If you want accountability, have a clear dashboard

I love Formula 1. Yep. I do. Love it. My son Jacko and I went to Singapore last year for his 21st to watch it. He thought it was great ‘Mumming’. I thought it was very clever.

Learning about the sport and how the team works together is a case study in high accountability. Blame has no place in the team. It doesn’t land. It is not tolerated. If drivers do it, it reflects poorly on them. If the engineers do it, it reflects poorly on the team.

It doesn’t mean they don’t have heated, passionate discussions. It doesn’t mean they don’t critically think. It doesn’t mean they don’t get frustrated, at systems and each other. They just know the buck stops with them. So they level up and take responsibility.

If you watch a race you will see that they make data-driven decisions – the whole time. When to pit and change tyres. When to take over another car. When to fall back. It’s all based on a dashboard in front of them – that they update by the second.

Then after the race they unpack their decisions based on the data they had in front of them. Clever.

In most leadership meetings we spend lots of time in discussions. Most of these discussions are opinion-based. ‘I think’. ‘I feel strongly about’. ‘It’s not what we do’. ‘I don’t think that will work’. And the merry-go-round continues as we are talking to others with strong opinions. And the unhealthy conflict festers. We ark up or shut down. And waste a lot of time. And often walk out with unspoken frustrations.

And we don’t have any tools to create accountability for future decisions. We haven’t set measures for what success will look like and rarely time frames for what, who, and when needs to be done.

We need a clear dashboard to have data-driven discussions. Sure we can have opinions about the data. But the numbers (which are way bigger than financials) are the rudder. Not our passionate opinions.

What do your leadership and team meetings have in terms of clear data? Do you use it to make decisions regularly?

Are your leadership meetings full of opinions instead of data-driven decisions? Do you want to learn how to create a culture of high accountability? Then check out my upcoming session on ‘Why it’s so hard to create high accountability cultures’ here.