Ultimately, personal accountability means accepting full responsib-
ility for results. It requires the sort of attitude popularized in the Nike footwear television commercials: “Just Do It.” If you don’t Do It, you’ll never reap the most valuable benefit that is derived from full account- ability: overcoming your circumstances and achieving the results you want. Despite the many benefits that accrue from applying the other three steps, results only come when you put all four steps together and Do It!
The Do It step bestows accountability, not just for activities, circum- stances, or feelings but for future accomplishment. When you combine the notion of accountability with the objective of accomplishing better results, you create an empowering and guiding beacon for both per- sonal and organizational activity. This form of accountability comes after you have progressed through all four steps Above The Line. By stopping at any step short of Do It, you may keep yourself out of the victim cycle, but you will never fully achieve a permanent position Above The Line. Any effort that falls short of making it happen and getting it done simply indicates a lack of full acceptance of account- ability.
“Doing it” requires that you work continuously to stay Above The Line, avoiding the occurrences inherent in daily circumstances and problems that can tempt you back Below The Line. As we constantly stress in this book, accountability is a process, and you can fall into the victim cycle just as easily from the fourth step to accountability as from any of the others. Staying Above The Line requires diligence, perseverance, and vigilance. It also requires a willingness to accept risk and to take the giant step that’s often necessary to accomplish what you want to have happen in your life or your organization. Fear of the risk of failing can be so debilitating that many people build walls between Solve It and Do It. However, only by accepting the risk can you penetrate the walls and break down all the barriers to success.
In the final analysis, Do It means embracing your full responsibility for results and remaining answerable for your progress in attaining those results, regardless of how or why you managed to get into your current situation. Consider the example of an American Van Lines driver who established his accountability and stayed Above The Line, even when the going got tough. It all started at the Teradata Corpor- ation, a company founded in a garage in Los Angeles now a part of Unisys. Teradata strove to fill a niche in the computer database market unserved by larger companies such as IBM. After the first two years
of hard effort they finally sold the first Teradata computer to a Fortune 500 company headquartered on the East Coast. That accomplishment prompted quite a celebration among Teradata’s 52 employees, who had worked together as a veritable family for two long years. Now, after all that effort, the company had turned the corner and was about to ship its first product.
On the Saturday morning scheduled for shipment of the computer, all the employees and their families gathered at the Teradata facility, a renovated warehouse that had replaced the garage in which the company had begun its operations, to give it a rousing send-off.
Streamers and signs hung from the rafters and the eaves of the warehouse roof. Everyone sported T-shirts with the words “The Big One” screened on the front and back. Even the American Van Lines driver who had contracted to deliver the shipment got caught up in the festivities as he climbed into the cab of his 18-wheeler.
As the contract driver pulled out of the parking lot with “The Big One” in tow, the Teradata families formed a parade route to cheer his departure. Moved by the moment, the driver waved back, shouting that he would not let them down. Indeed, the driver felt he had joined the Teradata team, even if for only this one haul, and he felt a strong sense of ownership and pride over the role he was playing in Teradata’s first major achievement.
Almost eight hours into his trip, the American Van Lines driver pulled into his first weigh station only to discover that his load was 500 pounds over the legal limit. He knew the overweight problem would require additional paper processing and approvals that could create a full day’s delay and prevent Teradata from meeting the promised delivery date. At this point, you can imagine how easy it would have been for this driver to fall Below The Line, blaming the company for the overweight problem. After all, it wasn’t his fault.
You can also imagine how easy it would have been for the driver to check into a motel to await further instructions. However, the driver stayed Above The Line by choosing to “own” the situation. Only he could “save” the delivery date. Recognizing the reality of his situation and owning the circumstances, he quickly moved to Solve It. In minutes he turned the truck around and drove to the nearest truck stop where he dismantled the truck’s front and rear bumpers, removed its extra water containers, and hid all the apparatus in a nearby ditch under some brush. He recalled thinking of the risk of losing the hidden
items; after all, he would be held accountable by the company that owned the rig, but such thoughts were only momentary as he accepted the risk as the only way to get the shipment delivered on schedule.
When he returned to the weigh station, the truck checked in 50 pounds under weight. With a great deal of pride and satisfaction in his accom- plishment, he drove on to the East Coast where he delivered “The Big One” on time. He had done it!
After hearing about the driver’s experience, the people at Teradata celebrated the driver’s See It, Own It, Solve It, Do It attitude by, among other things, incorporating his story into the company’s new employee orientation program as a symbol to reinforce the power of working Above The Line.
In another example of how seeing, owning, solving and doing combine to make extraordinary things happen, consider what Tracy Sullivan (not her real name) did for her product testing department at a mid-sized company.
The Southwestern Micro-Chip Corporation (SMC, also a disguised name) faced a problem: how to get its products to market faster. Al- though everyone at SMC was scrambling to accomplish this goal, no group in the company felt more responsible for it than the product testing department. Tracy, among the first in the company to “see”
the need several months earlier, had been working diligently with her department to “own” the company’s current circumstances and figure out a way to “solve” the problem. As she told the members of her department, who serviced all of SMC’s product management groups,
“Seeing, owning and solving this problem won’t make any difference unless we put our solutions into action and get results.”
With perseverance and determination, the product testing depart- ment, which the company’s product managers had all too often per- ceived as a serious bottleneck, began investigating the “best practices”
in the industry and related industries to find out how they could streamline the company’s product testing process. Equipped with those findings, the department had developed three different alternatives for cutting the product testing period by two-thirds without comprom- ising its fundamental purpose or its market research value.
In a special meeting with all the product management and market- ing personnel at SMC, Tracy presented her department’s recommend- ations, led a discussion of the pros and cons of each alternative, and invited all present to vote on the best alternative. When one of the
alternatives outpolled the others, the product testing department quickly put it into practice and managed not only to slash product testing time in half but gained the recognition of everyone in the company.
Tracy Sullivan’s efforts inspired the entire company to stay Above The Line in all its endeavors and to foster greater accountability throughout the organization. Once Tracy and others at SMC experi- enced the power of staying Above The Line, no matter how grim their circumstances became, they constantly reminded themselves that they could accomplish anything if they set their minds to it. Of course, that’s more easily said than done.