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Every quarter, teams hear some version of the same sentence in Fortune 500 boardrooms: "We need to hold each other more accountable."
It lands as a sign that leadership is getting serious. It reads more like a confession of failure.

By the time a leader has to enforce accountability, the failure has already happened. The demand for it is a receipt. It tells you something upstream already broke: the standard was left unclear, the commitment was assigned instead of chosen, or the leader`s own reactions taught people to hide problems.

Tightening the monitoring makes it worse. Harvard Business Review research found that closer monitoring erodes the ownership it was meant to produce. The strongest operators, the ones who never needed watching, read surveillance as an insult and leave.

My latest piece is on why that demand is a symptom you can diagnose, and where the real failure happens.

Article link: https://tr.ee/kfh6ccnGKG

If you would rather talk it through: Schedule a Meeting with Richard Smith: https://lnkd.in/ec7abkx3

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Open post by bentonbradfordconsulting with ID 17895563349568886

Every quarter, teams hear some version of the same sentence in Fortune 500 boardrooms: "We need to hold each other more accountable."
It lands as a sign that leadership is getting serious. It reads more like a confession of failure.

By the time a leader has to enforce accountability, the failure has already happened. The demand for it is a receipt. It tells you something upstream already broke: the standard was left unclear, the commitment was assigned instead of chosen, or the leader's own reactions taught people to hide problems.

Tightening the monitoring makes it worse. Harvard Business Review research found that closer monitoring erodes the ownership it was meant to produce. The strongest operators, the ones who never needed watching, read surveillance as an insult and leave.

My latest piece is on why that demand is a symptom you can diagnose, and where the real failure happens.

Article link: https://tr.ee/kfh6ccnGKG

If you would rather talk it through: Schedule a Meeting with Richard Smith: https://lnkd.in/ec7abkx3

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The most dangerous role change in a career is the one that comes with no new title.

A promotion comes with a memo: new title, new mandate, permission to retool. When the market shifts beneath a title that stays exactly where it is, nobody announces the change and nobody rewrites the scorecard. I am advising a leader in this spot right now. The environment has moved more in six months than in the prior decade, and the line that keeps surfacing is, “I don’t know what to do.”

In that kind of environment, you cannot see the outcome, but you can almost always see your next step. So, stop hunting for the destination. Find the next step, take it, evaluate what comes back, and move again.

If your title has held still while the work under it turned into something else, have you named the shift, or are you still doing the old job well?

Article link: https://tr.ee/z8QReudcBD

Schedule a Meeting with Richard Smith: https://lnkd.in/ec7abkx3

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Open post by bentonbradfordconsulting with ID 18072099800418808

The most dangerous role change in a career is the one that comes with no new title.

A promotion comes with a memo: new title, new mandate, permission to retool. When the market shifts beneath a title that stays exactly where it is, nobody announces the change and nobody rewrites the scorecard. I am advising a leader in this spot right now. The environment has moved more in six months than in the prior decade, and the line that keeps surfacing is, “I don’t know what to do.”

In that kind of environment, you cannot see the outcome, but you can almost always see your next step. So, stop hunting for the destination. Find the next step, take it, evaluate what comes back, and move again.

If your title has held still while the work under it turned into something else, have you named the shift, or are you still doing the old job well?

Article link: https://tr.ee/z8QReudcBD

Schedule a Meeting with Richard Smith: https://lnkd.in/ec7abkx3

0 0

Ask a chief executive to describe their culture and you will get a confident, articulate answer. It will also be incomplete. That’s because everything a leader learns about their culture arrives through a chain of people, and every link has a reason to smooth it. By the time it reaches the top, it is a heavily processed account, edited by everyone who would rather not hand bad news to power. So leaders reach for what they can see directly, the engagement score, the retention number, the values they model in the room. And they view those proxies as the culture. Those proxies are the part you can see, which is exactly why they are the most dangerous thing to trust. The better they look, the more confident you get, and that confidence is risky. My latest piece is on why you may be the last person to know your own culture.

Link in bio.

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Open post by bentonbradfordconsulting with ID 17896538442543007

Ask a chief executive to describe their culture and you will get a confident, articulate answer. It will also be incomplete. That’s because everything a leader learns about their culture arrives through a chain of people, and every link has a reason to smooth it. By the time it reaches the top, it is a heavily processed account, edited by everyone who would rather not hand bad news to power. So leaders reach for what they can see directly, the engagement score, the retention number, the values they model in the room. And they view those proxies as the culture. Those proxies are the part you can see, which is exactly why they are the most dangerous thing to trust. The better they look, the more confident you get, and that confidence is risky. My latest piece is on why you may be the last person to know your own culture.

Link in bio.

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