In the world of construction management, accountability is paramount to ensuring successful project outcomes. As a construction management leader, it is essential to grasp the complexities of forming and preserving an answerable group. This blog post will delve into various aspects of accountability in construction management that are essential for creating high-performance teams.

We’ll begin by discussing the importance of distinguishing between responsibility and accountability, followed by defining roles clearly for effective practices. We’ll also explore setting objectives and tracking progress continuously while fostering ownership over outcomes without assigning blame.

Furthermore, we’ll examine proactive approaches to addressing potential conflicts through effective communication channels and conclude with insights on building high-performance teams through proven accountability practices. By implementing these strategies within your organization, you can elevate your construction management efforts towards continuous improvement and long-term success.

Often when I teach a group the fundamentals of debriefing, I confront the reality that in our fast-paced world many organizations fail to address the fact that success isn’t a given. In fact, not only do many leaders I meet with readily confess that they don’t regularly debrief, they acknowledge that when they do, they do so to address failures or problems. Debriefing success as a regular occurrence is NOT a habit of many of the top organizations in the United States.

Just imagine the implications.

What if the success company A realized last quarter isn’t a direct result of its awesome product or brilliant marketing? What if instead company A’s success was a result of good luck and favorable market conditions? Can these factors be relied on to achieve consistent, positive results?

What if company B succeeded because of an innovative new approach used by one of its teams, an approach that deviates from standard procedures? What if this approach isn’t fully adopted and goes away next quarter for some unexplained reason? Will Company B continue to succeed?

What happens when we take our victories for granted?

In their article titled “Why Leaders Don’t Learn From Success”, authors Francesca Gino and Gary Pisano highlight this exact problem when they note, “In business…any number of factors may lead to success, independent of the quality of a product or management’s decisions. Yet it is all too common for executives to attribute the success of their organizations to their own insights and managerial skills and ignore or downplay random events or external factors outside their control. Imagine, for instance, that you are leading a team whose numbers are great: It’s tempting to credit yourself or your team’s actions for that achievement, though it may actually just be a stroke of good luck or the result of your competitors’ problems.”

Does this sound like your company? And does this sound like the way you might lead…from time to time? If so, what’s the problem?

Gino and Pisano further posit “that success can breed failure by hindering learning at both the individual and the organizational level. We all know that learning from failure is one of the most important capacities for people and companies to develop. Yet surprisingly, learning from success can present even greater challenges.” They go on to highlight fundamental attribution errors and overconfidence biases “two interrelated impediments to learning.” Furthermore, “The third impediment is the failure-to-ask-why syndrome—the tendency not to investigate the causes of good performance systematically. When executives and their teams suffer from this syndrome, they don’t ask the tough questions that would help them expand their knowledge or alter their assumptions about how the world works.”

Understanding the WHY behind performance is a key outcome of the debrief process.

One of the things we learned in the flying world was to not take our success for granted. Phrased another way, we ALWAYS investigated the root cause(s) of our successes to ensure we understood WHY we won. We did so because 1) we wanted to validate that our victory was a result of our good work and not luck; 2) we wanted to be able to justify celebrating individual successes of our teammates. The take-aways were consistently outstanding.

Instead of hoping we would continue to win in the future, we always understood why we won…which meant we also understood what it would take be able to win in the future. Instead of having to find people to call out during employee of the month-type events, we just looked at who it was that did consistently outstanding work as validated in the debriefs and highlighted them as our “Top Guns.” Employee engagement was high, and we were extremely confident in our ability to replicate success in any domain the world-over.

After a recent workshop I received the following text from one of the attendees, the CEO of a very successful engineering firm. He shared the following observation with me, one that I will pass along to you: “I can’t believe how common and comfortable it is to only debrief catastrophes. What a huge wasted opportunity. We debriefed our first win and through that developed a model to replicate more wins. WTF have I been missing out on?”

My advice: don’t take your victories for granted. You may be amazed at what you find…

Over the past year I’ve had the distinct privilege of working with business leaders and leadership teams across the United States. I’ve been able to share with them many of the lessons I’ve learned through the course of my military career, lessons that span the gamut from leading through volatility to the human dimension of work. Of all the things I teach, the human dimension has developed into a passion and has evolved into the most important part of my work today.

Why is this? Because if the human system fails, we can’t do the rest of the work we’ve set out to do. It’s that simple.

On a very personal level, it’s because I failed to listen to my own personal system when it sent me mission-critical signals…and I missed the opportunity of a lifetime to keep myself healthy enough to stay in the cockpit.

Articles and talks abound on the need to take time for self, on the need to make sure that the human system is functioning properly. At this point in time, there’s nothing revolutionary about suggesting that leaders and followers alike—people from all backgrounds and status levels—develop personal goals and take time out to achieve them. What might be considered revolutionary is getting people to actually follow-through with this part of the program…which is difficult to understand because the risk of not focusing on health means having to deal with the consequences down the road.

One of the popular ways in which many people begin the quest for their wellness is by setting the New Year’s resolution leading into a new year. However, in her article titled, “This is How Many People Actually Stick to Their New Year’s Resolutions”, author Ashley Moor cites a University of Scranton study suggesting that “only eight percent of people who make New Year’s resolutions will actually fulfill those goals in a timely fashion—if ever.”

Another popular way people advance their wellness is through work—companies of all sizes are increasingly offering wellness programs to help people become and then stay healthy.

However, In her blog titled, “Do Corporate Wellness Programs Really Work?”, author Briana Morgaine notes, “A recent RAND Corporation study found that while 85 percent of U.S. employers with 1,000 employees or more offered some form of wellness program, only 60 percent of employees at these companies were even aware that the program existed. Furthermore, of this 60 percent who knew that a wellness program was an option, only 40 percent actually participated in it.” In his Harvard Business Review article titled, “Employers Need to Recognize That Our Wellness Starts at Work”, author Jim Purcell notes, “Collectively, employers spend upward of $8 billion year on wellness programs—yet the programs underperform by most measures, and barely 25% of employers even try to understand how well their programs do.” How can this be, especially when metrics are so much a part of organizational life?

Supposing that these are the outliers—that the people we’re concerned with don’t just look at wellness as a New Year’s resolution-worthy event, and that they address their wellness needs outside of work—let’s look at how effective we are in the United States at “being healthy”. Jim Purcell suggests, “We all know that moderate exercise, proper diet, and not smoking are essentials for good health. Right? How many of us follow through on it? According to a 2016 study published in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 2.7% of Americans meet this fairly low standard of healthy living.” 2.7%, my friends. 2.7% of us meet this very basic, very rudimentary standard, at least as of 2016.

The simple fact of the matter is that care and maintenance of the human system can’t afford to be relegated to “something I’ll get around to.” Quite the contrary, care and maintenance of the human system has to be one of the, if not THE priority in each of our professional lives, specifically because our health is the engine that enables us to race along doing all of the things we need to do to be successful leaders or contributors to the teams with which we work.

So how do we break the mold and gain traction in the world of personal wellness?

It’s actually incredibly simple: we follow the process that works so well to help our teams achieve their goals—The Debrief-Focused Approach™—and we apply it in our personal lives. We start by defining what success looks like in terms of our health and wellness and we set achievable, measurable, and time-constrained objectives to help us achieve this definition of success. We develop actionable health and wellness development plans and communicate these plans with the people in our lives that we know will hold us accountable.

We demand of ourselves the discipline to follow through with our plans, and we regularly debrief our progress. And in our debriefs we hold ourselves accountable for meeting our objectives and marching forward on attaining the success we’ve mapped out to achieve.

The fact of the matter is that we have the tools, the know-how, and the smarts to do what we need to do. Now it’s just a matter of DOING what we need to do…and doing it NOW.

When a new fighter pilot considers the prospect of climbing in a $154M aircraft for the first time and employing it the way it was built to be employed, it can be slightly overwhelming. Because of how complicated the airplane systems are, and because the domain in which pilots employ these aircraft is so complex, there is no way that anyone would expect the new pilot to get everything right the first time. Or the second. Or the seventh. Or the twenty seventh, for that matter. In fact, the expectation is that it will take months until the new pilot is competent at the job, and years until he or she can be considered an expert. At the beginning and end of the day, it’s an incredibly tough way to make a living.

It can be even more tough if the Instructor Pilots on the various missions the new pilot flies use the debrief as a forum to highlight just how bad the new pilot is. They do this when they think that debriefs are all about being critical.

Despite the complexity of the operating environment, and despite the fact that the new pilot is expected to make a ton of mistakes, it’s incredibly easy for the Instructor Pilot to fall into the trap of only highlighting the negative, harping on the various mistakes as being evidence that the new pilot is a failure. After all, the negative always stands out, it’s really easy for everyone to see, and the subconscious thinking can be that we can effectively shame our teammates into improving. It’s also unfortunately how so many of us approach giving feedback, in debriefing others’ performance no matter what the domain. We might deliver our criticism with a smile, couched as being offered in a supportive way, but the words fall harshly and can be received as daggers by our recipients.

Interestingly, some observers propose that we learn best by receiving this kind of feedback. Some, but not all…>

In their HBR article “Why Organizations Don’t Learn”, authors Francesco Gino and Bradley Staats propose, “Leaders must constantly emphasize that mistakes are learning opportunities rather than cause for embarrassment or punishment, and they must act in ways that reinforce that message.” In other words, they suggest that our teammates shouldn’t be blamed or shamed for making mistakes, especially when those mistakes analyzed properly help promote a teammate’s growth.

What might this approach this mean, then, for our debriefs?

It means our debriefs are opportunities to build and develop our teammates. They’re where we outline the truth of what happened so that we can learn effectively…and very few people learn effectively by being blamed or shamed for their mistakes. All of this means that we need to fight the inclination to harp on the bad as being bad and recognize the good that comes from teammates pushing to improve and failing in the process.

Authors Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall, in their recent HBR article “The Feedback Fallacy” propose, “Focusing people on their shortcomings or gaps doesn’t enable learning. It impairs it.” They also suggest that, “…learning happens when we see how we might do something better by adding some new nuance or expansion to our own understanding. Learning rests on our grasp of what we’re doing well, not on what we’re doing poorly, and certainly not on someone else’s sense of what we’re doing poorly. And second, that we learn most when someone else pays attention to what’s working within us and asks us to cultivate it intelligently. We’re often told that the key to learning is to get out of our comfort zones, but these findings contradict that particular chestnut: Take us very far out of our comfort zones, and our brains stop paying attention to anything other than surviving the experience. It’s clear that we learn most in our comfort zones, because that’s where our neural pathways are most concentrated. It’s where we’re most open to possibility, most creative, insightful, and productive. That’s where feedback must meet us—in our moments of flow.”

So how do we address this tendency? How do we make debriefs events our teammates look forward to?

Very simple: we take a page from my good friend Les Landes’ book and we intentionally view our teammates as part of the solution to—as opposed to the source of—our problems. We see our role as leaders to help our teammates to improve in a human way, by finding the right approach to highlight our teammates’ successes and help them overcome their shortcomings.

A final point from Buckingham and Goodall: “We humans do not do well when someone whose intentions are unclear tells us where we stand, how good we “really” are, and what we must do to fix ourselves. We excel only when people who know us and care about us tell us what they experience and what they feel, and in particular when they see something within us that really works.” In other words, debriefs are NOT all about being critical. They’re about working through human means to develop our teammates to be as good as they can be.