Scott Edmonds, president and CEO of the hugely successful chain of Chico's clothing stores, recently spearheaded the acquisition of specialty clothing chain Fitigues. Although made up of only nine stores, Fitigues became Edmonds's pet project and he was soon devoting a great deal of time and energy to it. He didn't realize that his emotional commitment outweighed his business sense until the members of his senior executive team called him on it. They told him, point-blank, that the acquisition had become his blind spot and was draining his time away from core business issues.  How would you have responded to feedback like this from your team? Would you have pushed the eject button on the carriers of bad news or grinned and gone forward as usual? If you wouldn't have closed the Fitigues business, the way Edmonds did, it is doubtful you would make the cut as a high-performance leader.

The New High-Performance Leader
For more than 25 years, our firm has worked with senior leaders in nearly every industry and around the world to develop high-performance teams and organizations. Stepping back to analyze our clients' successes and challenges, we have been able to identify a number of key characteristics that set every great team apart from the also-rans. Of these traits, perhaps the most important are the role and the impact of the leader.  Every great team we have worked with has had a special breed of leader. We call this new breed "high-performance leaders," and they are radically different from leaders in traditional, hierarchical organizations. High-performance leaders reconceptualize the business in two important ways, beginning with the vision they hold for their organization.  To overcome the immediate challenges and those that lie ahead, high-performance leaders have scuttled the traditional hierarchical organizational model and replaced it with a flat, horizontal one. In Scott Edmonds's case, he knew that for Chico's to survive and succeed in the dog-eat-dog world of women's retailing, where styles and taste can change on a whim, it had to change the way it operated. A horizontal structure would allow Chico's to act quickly and decisively. As Edmonds sees it, a horizontal organization is characterized by "high-performance teams with real decision-making clout and accountability for results" instead of "committees that pass decisions up to the next level or toss them over the wall to the nearest silo." But their vision of a flat organization, where power and authority are pushed down through the ranks, does not in itself make these leaders a breed apart. In a second area—the relationship of team members and their leader—high-performance leaders don't just reconceptualize. They revolutionize. They cast off the old leader-follower dynamic, revamping if not completely doing away with the distinction between the two. As David Epstein, CEO of Novartis Oncology, puts it, "What I want to see [on my team] is leaders, not followers."

The high-performance leader-player dynamic rests on a radically different notion of accountability. On a high-performance team, not only are team members held accountable for results by the leader; they are expected to hold one another accountable and—in the most significant departure of all—they are expected to hold the leader equally accountable.

The Leader's Challenge: Changing the Mind-Set

Given the departure from the narrow, "I'm responsible for me and my department," hierarchical approach to accountability, not surprisingly it takes effort and skill to make the transition to a model where all team members—and their leader—are held equally accountable. Overcoming players' reluctance to cross functional lines, question their peers and leader, and deliver honest, candid feedback requires change at the deepest, "inner person" level—on the part of both the leader and the team.

Following are six actions that a leader can take to help team members make the shift to the new paradigm and become true high performers:

Action: Show How It's Done

How do you get team members to break through the barriers that prevent them from calling one another—and you—on behaviors that compromise the achievement of business results? The surest way: Walk the talk.  A leader who brooks no disagreement can hardly expect others to encourage open dialogue. Leaders who ask for honesty must prove that they really want it—even if it is directed at them. They do this most convincingly by listening to a critique of their own performance and acting on it, by changing behavior that the team tells them is unacceptable, by not cutting off dissenters or denigrating their opinions, by not pulling rank when it's time to make a decision. As Chuck Nesbit, executive vice president and COO of Chico's, puts it, "If a lieutenant in Iraq doesn't have the courage to ride the Humvee down the road, he can't expect his troops to do it."  Chico's Edmonds recounts how, six or seven months after a new member was added to his team, it became apparent that the individual was not delivering the needed results. The team was waiting for Edmonds to terminate the newcomer. Edmonds admits that he was "thinking too much from the heart and not enough from the head," so he dragged his feet for a while—until a couple of team members came into his office and shut the door. They told him that the team expected him to do something about this person and to do it quickly. Edmonds immediately stepped up and accepted accountability. He acknowledged that they were right, shook their hands, and said he was committed to taking swift action. He told them not to let him off the hook. Two days later he terminated the executive.  Edmonds's role-modeling of accountability has paid off. In 2007, Chico's first-quarter business results were off plan, and things hadn't improved much by the end of May. His senior vice presidents—the second tier of his management team—didn't wait around for permission to act; turning around poor performance was everyone's responsibility. Edmonds got a phone call from some of the SVPs saying, "As owners of the business we want to submit a plan to you and the EVPs to deal with the situation." Several days later, they presented the plan, which was on point and adopted with only minor modifications.  There's an additional benefit when the leader and the top team model peer-to-peer accountability for the rest of the organization: It soon extends to teams everywhere. Explains Ken Bloom, CEO of INTTRA, Inc., "If I don't do something I have promised, any member of my team can come to me and ask, 'Why aren't you honoring your agreement?' Everyone in the company knows it, and it gives them license to do the same."

Action: Invite Feedback

Knowing how difficult it is for people to deliver negative feedback to the boss, Larry Allgaier, CEO of Novartis's Global OTC business, has devised a way to make it easier. "If I have even an inkling that something is troubling someone," he explains, "I initiate a conversation that makes it easy for them to give me the feedback. For example, I called our general manager in France and said, ‘I don't think I'm as connected with the European GMs as I need to be. What do you think?'" Knowing he had "permission" to deliver honest feedback, the GM didn't hold back. His response: "You're right, Larry. I understand that the developing markets may need you more this year, but we would like to see you in our countries more often." Allgaier is convinced that he would not have gotten this feedback if he had not intentionally opened the door. He asks his team members to do the same thing with their own teams. Allgaier says, "Getting good feedback, honest and timely, is one of the hardest things for any executive because of the natural fear in the system. You have to really disarm people if you want the truth, and the faster you can get the truth, the faster you can apply the learning to yourself and your business."  Allgaier solicits feedback on his performance in a very subtle way, while Joe Amado, until recently vice president of information services and CIO of Philip Morris USA, actually formalized the process by which his team held him accountable. Every year, he asked the members of his IT team to complete a "leadership scorecard" on him. "It's like 360-degree feedback," Amado explains, "but it's not on paper. It's person to person." Joe kicked off a half-day meeting, then left his team members to

confer among themselves to answer questions in four major categories: How well does Amado allocate resources? Provide direction? Build capabilities? Give feedback on performance?  When he came back into the room, they gave him their honest feedback. Amado carefully considered their input and then made the adjustments needed to further his personal journey to high performance.

Action: Admit Your Mistakes

Larry Allgaier also believes that one of the best ways a leader can encourage mutual accountability is by owning up to personal mistakes in front of the team. Unlike old-school leaders who carefully maintain the fiction of their infallibility, Allgaier openly admits misjudgments and turns them into learning experiences. He recounts his problems recruiting a global head of product supply. The position was empty when Allgaier became CEO, and within six months he filled it with a candidate of his own choice. The person wasn't a good fit for the job and quit in less than a year. Allgaier once again filled the job, and although the individual was highly qualified and was interviewed by other members of the lead team, the person lacked the cultural agility to make things happen with the rigor, depth, and speed required, and once again it was not a good fit. Allgaier decided to use the case as a learning opportunity for himself and his lead team. He held a very open three-hour debriefing with his team, beginning with explaining what he felt he had missed in the two previous candidates. The team went deep, hammering out the real requirements of the job and proposing new ways to structure the role for enhanced speed of execution and organizational effectiveness. It took nine months to find the right person, but the third time around it worked out beautifully.  Allgaier encourages his team to follow his example. "I tell them that I want the bad news first, and no matter how bad it is, I don't beat them up for it. The right type of players have high accountability for their work, and they already feel worse about their mistake than you can make them feel. We focus on what we can learn from the mistake and how we can correct it as soon as possible."

Action: Learn to Depersonalize

Allowing your team to hold you accountable takes having a thick skin. As chief learning officer for Mars Inc., Jon Shepherd is part of the global people and organization (HR) team. One of the post-alignment sessions in which that team took part included a review of the team's answers to the questions, "How would you rate your leader's performance, and what does he need to do differently to improve it?" Shepherd believes that the HR team's leader demonstrated real bravery in the way he handled the feedback. "Our team is a very mixed group," he explains, "so the comments were all over the map. Some people wanted more direction and clarity, more structure; others were critical of the leader's tendency to solve their problems for them. Our leader sat through the long session—over an hour and a half—and listened to each person. He didn't try to explain or excuse himself; he didn't try to provide solutions. He just absorbed it." The leader then led a follow-up session in which he and the group identified actions they could take together to address each concern. "Hearing these things for the first time must shake you up and raise doubts about your abilities," adds Shepherd, "but our leader never got rattled or became defensive. He exhibited skill—and bravery."  In our opinion, he did something else that all those who are on the receiving end of negative feedback need to do: He depersonalized the group's comments, treating them as a "business case" rather than an attack. Depersonalizing feedback was a real problem for Roy Anise, former vice president and general manager of Chrysalis Technologies, a division of Philip Morris USA, and his team. Anise says, "Their self-worth always seemed to be on trial. They didn't understand that being questioned didn't imply being criticized personally." Anise helped the team break out of this mind-set by role-modeling the willingness to take accountability for his performance and depersonalizing feedback. He told them that if they saw him not living up to his commitments and came to him with that feedback, he would view it as a gift. He even distributed a number of Starbucks gift cards to his team and asked them to give one back to him each time they challenged him, so they would feel as though they were giving him a gift.

Action: Get Help If You Need It

Many leaders who set out to create great teams successfully change the mind-set of their players, yet are never able to complete the self-transformation. The leader who pays lip service to total accountability but still bristles at receiving any less-than-laudatory comment needs to ask, "What story am I clinging to that's keeping me from making this change?" and "Why?" Self-examination may be enough to break through the barrier; if not, personal coaching may be called for.  Roy Anise realized that he tended to be very directive and had trouble connecting, but when he got candid feedback from the members of his team, he was surprised to learn that they judged him to be far more aggressive than he believed he was. As a result, they were uncomfortable expressing their viewpoints or making decisions on their own. He received similar feedback from his boss, which spurred him to seek coaching.  During his first session with the coach, Anise explained that, as a leader, he was unsure of how his team was progressing and where he needed to take it next. His statement prompted the coach to comment, "Now I know why you are so intimidating." "What are you talking about? I haven't said anything to you," countered Anise. "That's exactly the point," replied the coach. "You keep your cards so close to the chest, so covered up, that I have no idea what you're thinking and what's going on with you. I can see why people who work for you would feel the same sense of not knowing what's going on with you. I can see why they're intimidated."  Anise bristled at the exchange. But a day later he contacted the coach to thank him for his insight. The coach, of course, had simply been mirroring his pupil's behavior, which had caused Anise to see the light. As Anise said about his coach, "He exposed me and initially I didn't like it, but I needed to hear it." Once Anise had seen himself as others saw him, he could begin making changes. As he projected a more open, receptive image, the people on his team became more comfortable offering opinions and raising objections.

Action: Relax and Learn

For most team leaders, receiving feedback evokes all the joy of a tooth extraction, and team members generally wind up equating feedback with pain and suffering. But feedback on great business teams isn't typically a brutal, punishing experience for the leader who receives it or the players who give it. David Epstein actually likes it when team members hold him accountable, as long as their feedback is well grounded and logical. In his view, "The people who speak up and stir the pot help me make the right decisions. They help me make sure the organization is moving in the right direction; if they point out that we are off course, I'm always willing to make changes."  Nor does holding leaders accountable necessarily mean taking them to task for underperformance. It may simply entail raising an issue that hasn't been brought up before or resurfacing an issue that has fallen off the radar screen so a solution can be hammered out.  For example, when Cathy Burzik was president of Applied Biosystems, the company that created the scientific instruments used in the sequencing of the human genome, she certainly wasn't shirking her duty or underperforming, but in the view of her team she needed to refocus her attention. As Mark Stevenson, one of AB's executive vice presidents at the time, describes it, "Cathy had a tendency to want to get involved in the details. We pointed out to her that we felt she should be focusing on the ‘go forward strategy' for the company. She listened and was agreeable to our taking over more and more of the operational details. She became comfortable enough to take off a full week to celebrate her wedding anniversary. We told her, ‘Go and enjoy yourself; we can operate the business without you,' and she did just that."

No Substitute for Role-Modelling

Accountability along the lines suggested in this article does not happen by chance or by the sheer willpower of the leader. The process begins with you, the leader, and your willingness to change your mind-set about leadership and followership. Once this occurs, you can then go about reframing the

(This Accountable Leader was written by Howard M Guttman - http://www.leadertoleader.org/knowledgecenter/journal.aspx?ArticleID=757)