Understanding the power of a quality relationship management depends a good deal on an awareness of people’s behaviour and preferences. Soliciting from any group, community or department, what motivates, inspires and provides satisfying experiences is key to creating strong bonds and powerful alliances that drive buy in and support, no matter the context.

Currently relationship management, across all it’s various attributions, is poorly understood and even more abysmally executed. If the current understanding of relationship management is simply to monitor and respond to negative commentary on your reputation, your brand, your business or your services, or to follow up and cross sell when the customer or client has fallen off your radar, this is no better than shutting the stable door long after the horse has bolted it. It’s about listening, responding, reciprocating, acknowledging, modeling ethics and values, everywhere you are or your business is active.

The value of building and maintaining a reputation built on the seven principles of human givens (accountability, boundaries, respect, responsibility, honesty, support and trust) means creating cooperative alliances and rewarding relationships. This cannot be short cut, avoided, undeserved or manipulated. We are each being held to account on our behaviours in regard to our commitments and on this we stand or fall in peer assessment.

There is no excuse now, given the quantity and quality of tracking technologies and social media assets, not to create a formidable and very manageable strategy to build and sustain quality relationships and use all positive testimonials, word of mouth recommendations and quality referrals to build personal and professional capital as well as business advantage. To fail to implement such a strategy is to be asleep at the wheel in a fast moving and competitive world.

In the wake of the recent revelations of UK politicians financial expenses abuses, provoked the last straw for the british populace. The continuous erosion of public trust met the usual swathe of promises, assurances which only demurred into a flagrant ignoring of public opinion finally diminished the last vestige of respect. The people now demand full accountability, even for what could be, in perspective, minor conflagrations. The widespread ire is compounded in further transparently obvious favouritism of who is encouraged to fall on their sword and who is conferred leniency.

This episode has brought into sharp clarity the need for full transparency and accountantability from politicians, who are, in fact, public servants, drawing very adequate salaries, backed up with substantial pensions. It is the opinion of the Relationship Capital Institute that politicans need to bring a new level of responsible governance that forges a renewed trust, for without it, both they and the public suffer crises that stymies positive recovery in a time of considerable recession and all suffer.

I suggest that they set up a department that educates politicians on what it is to create relationship capital and how the bedrock of values that resources the building of such a necessary quality will renew and restore the peoples trust.

Firstly, let’s clarify what culture is?

Culture is embodied in the phrase “this is the way we do things around here”. More precisely, “what people perceive they have to do to fit in, be accepted and rewarded around here”. Culture is the sum of the behavioural norms of the workgroup, team, division or organisation. It is relatively common to have different cultures between teams or divisions within the one organisation. These are referred to as sub-cultures and they can range from being marginally different from the culture of the overall organisation to being quite radically different. This has implications for not only understanding an organisation’s culture but also for managing it effectively.

Why is culture important?

Have you ever tried to stay within the speed limit when everyone around you is driving at speeds well over the speed limit? The behavioural norms of a group can strongly influence the behaviour of the individual. Culture defines the behavioural norms (accepted behaviour) in a group, team, division or organisation. In turn, behaviour underpins the performance (what gets done, when it gets done and how it gets done) of the organisation and perceptions (reputation) of that organisation.

A Framework for Managing Culture

While managing culture requires a range of approaches and cannot simply be managed by dictating theculture you want, it is essentially about managing messages. The objective is to ensure messages are consistently conveyed through aligned behaviours (especially of key people), systems and symbols.

What is accountability?

The key concept is the notion of having a sense of ‘responsibility’ and a willingness to be ‘answerable’ to others and is the difference between a group and a team. In our experience, the most important factor in developing accountability is the quality of leadership and management (and this is the only aspect leaders or managers are really in ‘control’ of). Good leaders and managers generate high levels of accountability in their people.

Whilst organisations should plan to recruit the right people in terms of their willingness to be team players and be accountable; recruitment is only the starting point. The real key is what leaders and organisations do from that point onwards. Good recruits can be ‘lost’ in poorly lead organisations with unsupportive cultures. Many managers see accountability as being attributed to an individual’s values, therefore they blame the individual and underestimate their own role in creating an accountability culture. In doing this, a great opportunity to build a high performance organisation is missed.

Responsibility is not blame

It is important not to mistake responsibility for blame as they are diametrically opposed concepts. Where one exists the other will not remain.Responsibility is the ability to make a response,it is future and action focused. Blame is past focused and is more about the ego – isolating people, teaching them a lesson, point scoring or making them feel guilty/bad than it is about accountability. Guilt and fear is not a good basis for developing accountability.

A Framework for Building an Accountability Culture

We see the steps in building an accountability culture as
being:

1. Building trust as the foundation:

The four key elements of trust are

• Openness/transparency (giving and accepting feedback, transparency in decision making)

• Reliability (doing what you say you are going to do)

• Congruence (saying what you mean)

• Acceptance (acceptance of others and acceptance of differences).

2. Engage your people: meaningful involvement with alignment. Remember you can’t truly and sustainably motivate another person but you can engage them. It is through engagement that motivation will grow.

3. Ownership: once the first two elements are in place people start to ‘take’ ownership – they start to think and act like owners. (As this happens the future possibility for selling down equity, as part of the firm’s succession plan, becomes a reality).

The level of accountability is directly related to the level of trust, engagement and ownership that exists within an organisation. Certainly work at improving all levels simultaneously; however remember higher levels in the pyramid cannot progress any faster than the base they are built on, there are no short cuts. Without trust and engagement no performance measures and rewards will be particularly effective over the medium to long term – you cannot buy accountability. The key to building a culture of accountability is to find a way to lead people without ruling them.

Note: This article appears in the Institute of Chartered Accountants magazine “Charter” in October 2007.