Accountability from Ken



Are you accountable for Leadership of your Team?

The number one trait of great leaders: the ability to change the behavior of others.

Think about it: If people were going to give us their absolute best safety, quality, sales, production, and customer service automatically, then most managers would be out of a job.

Your success as a leader depends on one thing more than any other: your ability to change the behavior and improve the performance of your followers.

The true test of every leader is what their employees do “in the moment of choice, when nobody is watching.”

Remember the story about the lawyer who quit her job to become a waitress? Her boss was always pointing to her mistakes but never complimenting her extra efforts. It was the boss, not the company that caused her to walk away.

Ken Blanchard coined the term, “Leave Alone/Zap” for this management style. This may help explain why research showed that 68 percent of employees had never heard the words “Thank you” from their bosses, even though they consistently rank the need for positive feedback as #1 or #2 in job satisfaction.

We all instinctively know that we feel good when we are given sincere, specific, positive feedback. 

Why then, are fewer than 30 percent of our leaders using it?

Would any company be happy producing a product that worked properly only 30 percent of the time? 

Why are we willing to tolerate a management that manages people properly only 30 percent of the time? The sad truth is that without even knowing it, the majority of leaders today are using Leave Alone/Zap management tactics.