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Peer Reviews
In SEAL training, the concept of accountability literally starts on day one, and as we say, our training is never complete. One of the fundamental elements to our selection process is not just the ratings and feedback students get from the instructors, but we have an anonymous peer review process, too. And this process is something we perform typically on a weekly basis or almost on a weekly basis, where it’s almost like an anonymous 360-review process amongst the class, where the class is rating their fellow peers on who’s top performers, who’s middle of the pack, who’s not cutting it so much. And the instructors weigh that data very heavily in who they keep and who they do not keep. And that helps us start to build that mindset of the importance of accountability.
As you can imagine, accountability is critically important in the dangerous environments that we operate in. We call it VUCA environments, the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environments that we operate in all over the world, where things are changing at the speed of war, bullets are flying everywhere. And if you don’t have 100 percent accountability on the team, lives are at stake.
Now again, I know it’s not the case necessarily in most business organizations, but there are ways that you can really start to instill accountability into the culture of your organization. We started in the early days of SEAL training: using that peer review process, holding each other accountable, holding ourselves accountable. And oftentimes, that process isn’t so much about people not being the fastest runner or the fastest swimmer or the best shooter on the shooting range. There are more ethical issues at play, cultural issues at play, value systems that aren’t shared with the values of the NSW organization, basically people you would not trust to be standing next to you in a gunfight in someone’s living room in Ramadi, Iraq. Those types of people get filtered out very, very quickly, and never make it past the first couple months of training.
Leaders First
In a business organization, obviously accountability is critically important. One of the best ways to describe it is through one of the case studies I focus on in the book because, again, these are cultural elements and oftentimes people have a hard time wrapping their head around the financial implications that these culture pillars have.
One of my clients is a large San Diego-based medical device company. They’re a global publicly traded company, but years ago under a different brand they were essentially a failing entity. They were one of the most leveraged businesses in their space with 350 million in revenue, 550 million in debt, stock price was plummeting. And they were known to have good intentions, but horrendous execution. And as a last-ditch effort to save the organization, the board brought in a new CEO, but he did something totally different. He used the traditional change management tactics of sifting through years of financial data, consulting reports, finding new areas to reinvest in research and development, and put in place new systems, new processes, new departments, what have you.
But one day a light bulb went off, and he was talking to one of his marketing directors about these really go-to people they had in one of their divisions. They’re accountable, they get the work done, they go above and beyond. If they do make a mistake, they immediately course correct and put a plan in place so that never happens again. And she was saying, “Well, imagine if everybody in our organization was like that.” And that’s when the light bulb went off. And that’s when he shifted his focus as a leader away, not just solely to a set of financials to make financialized decisions, but to their culture and improving their culture to try and achieve a culture of, in theory, 100 percent accountability, to make sure that everybody in the organization were go-to people like the people in that one division in the organization.
And the result was that over the next three years, their stock price went from $.23 a share to $48.58 a share. They started growing at 15 percent a year, which is unheard of for organizations in that space and of that size, and then later sold it to a large global healthcare company for a huge return on equity investment. So, it all starts with leadership behaviors and focusing on building accountability into the culture.
And again, going back to consistency of action, consistency of word, and as a leader, vocally and publicly owning your mistakes first. When you can do that, other people will start to get on board and be like, you know what, all this finger-pointing and infighting really doesn’t get us anywhere. It just makes things worse. But, you know, this person up at the top, she’s owning the mistakes when there’s plenty of blame to go around. I’ve seen global CEOs, amazing Navy SEAL commanders, generals, own massive mistakes even though there was a lot of blame to go around. But ultimately, if you’re thinking about discipline and accountability, real owners own those mistakes, and then they put a plan in place to make sure that those mistakes never happen again. And they do that consistently time and time and time again, and that’s when it permeates an organizational culture.