Establishing appropriate accountability is one of the key actions required for achieving lasting success in any management activity.
This is especially the case in activities aimed at creating lasting change in the way things are done – like in an inventory optimization project.
To achieve lasting and sustainable inventory optimization you need to establish the appropriate accountability for those undertaking the review actions and those responsible for implementing the change.
Recently I encountered a situation where some of the team were very keen to avoid any direct accountability.
No real surprise there as this is often the case.
What did surprise me was the effort they put in to ensure that they could not be held to account for making the necessary changes (if only they had worked so hard on actually undertaking the required tasks!).
One specific avoidance action was to reject attempts to install any system of measurement that showed what progress was being made with their efforts at inventory optimization and executing the requires changes.
But here is the catch.
Now that there is real progress and genuine early success with the inventory reduction those same people now are concerned that they are not getting recognition for their work!
They have undertaken the inventory optimization tasks from our training but now complain that there is a lack of transparency showing how much good work they have done.
That is the flip side of accountability – recognition.
If you do not have the necessary transparency to indicate who has done what, then you don’t have the transparency to show who to reward for their good efforts.
We are now working on changing this at that company but it is a lesson that team has learned the hard way.
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