Feedback on the June Minnesota Business Journal Power Player article (No Excuses, p. 40) suggests that my rural roots are showing – and that sales leaders connect with the down-to-earth business insights they generate. If you haven’t guessed yet, the article focuses on my vision of what accountability means for business today.

So, I’ve been reflecting on the relationship between ranch life and the life of the business leaders I work with every day.

I’ve seen my fair share of tractors. When I was a kid growing up in North Dakota, especially in springtime, our landscape was dotted with these red or green mechanical horses. But unlike horses, tractors had a habit of getting stuck in the mud. And staying stuck until resourceful human beings unstuck them.

Assessing the situation accurately, rolling up your sleeves, and unsticking your tractor was one option. A second was to let the fact of the mud overwhelm you, cause you to curse and throw things, and make you wonder why you kept doing this year after year. A third option was to sit and stare calmly at the tractor, willing it to unstick itself, and when that didn’t work, give up for the day and hope the tractor would be easier to unstick tomorrow, when the mud might be drier.

Options two and three had emotional benefits, sure, but the result was a tractor just as mired in mud as before.

Today’s businesspeople are farmers & ranchers as surely as those I grew up with. Their harvests are a bit different on the surface, but it’s all the same in the end.

Their mud is the sludgy, sticky economy.

Their tractors are their people, their processes, their visions.

I have tremendous respect for Rich Breau, president of Breau Bros Garage, a business consulting firm specializing in people, operations and strategy. In a conversation today, he mentioned that healthy cultures have two things in common. First, they know that culture starts at the top. Second, they have strong accountability. He defined strong accountability as having these characteristics: 

·      Well-defined performance standards

·      Rigor to achieve those performance standards 

·      A response for when the performance standards aren’t met 

Whether you’re a CEO, a president or a VP of Sales, these accountability characteristics apply, don’t they?  

This list reminds me of questions that another colleague, Dr. Mark McCloskey, uses in his business consulting practice when he’s getting to know the culture of a company: 

·      What really matters around here?

·      How are you doing on what really matters to you?

·      How do you know?

·      What are you going to do about how you are doing?

Great questions to ask yourself as you think through your company culture. How are you doing in creating the a high performance culture that keeping Making It Happen?