A Lack of Ownership and Accountability
The Challenge
“Our workers need to take ownership.” We hear it all the time. Organizations need to create a business environment and culture where people are empowered to think for themselves, develop their own solutions and get buy-in from their managers to move forward and implement them. The first step is to get your frontline the right skills, the right tools and a good attitude.
The Core Problem: “The Dump and Run”
Within the business culture of many organizations, frontline employees identify problems and dump them on the manager’s desk. Managers may already be overwhelmed with projects and assignments, yet they tolerate this behavior and take on more work. If they can’t get to it, employees complain. If they do get to it, employees may complain about the approach. “I told my manager about the problems and they haven’t fixed them.” In this case, employees are holding managers accountable for employee problems.
Perhaps more importantly, managers are training their workers to not think. The message that the manager transmits with this behavior is, “I’ll do all the thinking. Your job is to do, not to think.” In this day and age, no work organization can afford that.
How do managers eliminate the “dump and run”? What alchemy makes frontline employees embrace accountability to create and implement solutions?
The Solution Grass Roots Innovation™ (GRI™)
Empowering and then holding employees accountable are considered key solutions to some of today’s greatest business challenges. And, if you empower them, they will hold themselves accountable. Employees want to be engaged and respected and want their ideas to count. Let’s give them the proper skills and tools to carry that out.
In GRI workshops, our instruction employs real-life situations to establish a strategy for settling the “ownership” debate. We make it clear that employees have a stake in solving their own problems and delivering results…in fact, we make it exciting and fun for them to do it! We establish a methodology where the people closest to the problems do the work to eliminate the problems. They identify them, conduct the root cause analysis, propose solutions and establish metrics to track progress. This formula creates ownership and accountability at the frontline level to implement action plans and stick with them through their successful completion. When we’re done, you have innovators in every position at the frontline, and they’re using the methodology to deliver benchmarked results with return on investment.
