📍 Hey, everybody. Thank you for being here. Welcome back to No Silver Spoons. I am Sarah Beth Herman, and we are almost at the end of season five. Today's episode is episode number 138 of The Human Side of Leadership: Stop Saving People from the Consequences of Their Own Choices. We have spent this summer doing this amazing series, and we are getting so close to wrapping it all up.

My team is already working on season six. We're planning what's next, we're planning what's changing, and we're bringing into the show some really awesome content. I'm excited about where we are going, but I don't wanna rush through these last few episodes because I think some of these conversations that we're having right now are some of the most important conversations we've had all season, and dare I say, throughout the entire podcast.

This episode is personal because I'm talking about something that I've for sure done, and I've done it a lot. I have tried to save employees from themselves. I have given people another chance when they were probably on chance number 17. I have moved people around because I thought maybe the position was the problem.

I've retained people because I thought maybe we didn't train them well enough the first time. I've changed processes. I've had conversations and then follow-up conversations to those conversations. I've tried to motivate people. I've tried to understand what was happening at home. I've tried to figure out whether something personal was affecting them professionally.

I've tried to pay them more. Sometimes  that was exactly what I should have done, and sometimes I was rescuing them, and there is a difference So here's where we're starting today. You might be the reason someone on your team isn't performing, and not because you're a bad leader and not because you didn't train them.

It may actually be the opposite. You may have stepped in so many times that the person has never had to experience what happens when they don't do what they said they were going to do, and that's a hard thing to admit as a leader. It certainly has been for me because I like helping people. I like seeing people succeed.

I love watching somebody come into one of my companies and become better at something. I love watching somebody get promoted, gain confidence, make more money, and learn something they didn't know six months ago. That's one of my favorite parts of owning businesses. But I've had to learn something. Seeing potential in someone does not obligate them to do something with it, and that's a Sarah Beth quote, so write that one down.

I've seen potential in a lot of people, and I've wasted a lot of time trying to convince some of them to see what I saw. Eventually, I had to understand that I cannot want somebody's career more than they do. I can't want their success more than they do. I can't want them to be accountable more than they do, and I definitely cannot spend the rest of my life standing behind somebody cleaning up everything that they have left unfinished And then I hired family.

, If you've never hired a family member, I'm not going to tell you not to, but I'm also not going to sit here and pretend that it's easy. I've hired family. I've had family members work for me who were some of the worst employees on the planet.

I loved them, but terrible employees. Both things can be true at exactly the same time. That's something nobody really teaches you when you're starting a business. You think, "Well, I know this person. I trust this person. They know me. They know how hard I've worked to build this. Surely they're going to care about it because they care about me."

Nope. Those things do not automatically transfer. Family makes accountability incredibly complicated because you know too much. If a regular employee is late, you know they're late. If your family member is late, you know why they're late. You know what happened last night. You know what's happening in their relationship.

You know what their kids are doing. You know why they're tired. You know their financial situation. You know their history, and now you're sitting there as an employer thinking about all of that while you're supposed to be evaluating one thing.  Did this person do the job? And that's really hard.

I've absolutely allowed my personal relationship with someone to influence how long I tolerated something professionally.- I don't do that the same way anymore because I finally realized that when you make a special rule for one person, you haven't only made a decision about that person, you've made a decision that affects everybody else who follows that rule Your employees know when someone gets away with something.

You may think they don't, but trust me, they do. They know who gets the extensions. They know who is chronically late. They know who doesn't answer messages. They know who isn't carrying their weight. They know whose work gets quietly handed to somebody else. Eventually, your reliable employee begins asking a very fair question.

Why am I working this hard if the standard doesn't actually mean anything? And that's when your compassion for one person starts costing you the trust of everybody else. I've done this another way too. I've hired people from companies I previously worked for. I knew them, I'd worked beside them, I'd watched them.

Sometimes I even knew their weaknesses before I hired them. But somewhere in my brain I thought, " They're going to be different working for me. I own this place. I can make the decisions." It's almost funny to me now because why would I ever think that? I thought our relationship would change their performance.

I thought they would work harder because it was my company. I thought they would communicate better because they knew me. I thought, "They won't do that to me." And I've learned something through experience. A relationship is not a performance qualification. Can I repeat that again? A relationship is not a performance qualification.

Somebody liking you doesn't make them a good employee. Somebody respecting you doesn't necessarily mean they're going to follow through, and somebody having worked well beside you in the past doesn't mean they're going to work well for you now. Sometimes the very thing that you already know about someone is the thing you talk yourself out of believing when you're hiring them.

We need somebody. They're available. We know them. They're familiar. So we start negotiating with ourselves. They used to have attendance problems, but they were great with deadlines, but they weren't great with deadlines, but they had trouble with that manager, but I'm different. Okay, maybe. People absolutely can grow.

People can change. They mature. I've changed enormously throughout my career. But somebody else's potential for change isn't a hiring strategy. You have to look at the person who is actually standing in front of you, not only the person you think you can turn them into. Mistake is not a pattern. This is one area where I've really changed as a leader.

I pay attention to patterns. I think there are at least four different things leaders have to distinguish: a mistake, a knowledge gap, a pattern, and a choice. Those all are not the same thing. If someone makes a mistake, welcome to being a human being. I'm going to make mistakes today. You're going to make mistakes today.

I own companies, and I make mistakes. . My team members make mistakes. That is normal. If somebody doesn't know how to do something, that's different. Teach them. Show them. Give them the SOP. Let them shadow somebody. Have them demonstrate it back to you. Make sure they actually understand.

But when somebody knows what to do, they have been trained to do it, they have been reminded to do it, they've received feedback about not doing it, and then continue not doing it, we're not dealing with the same problem anymore. Now we're looking at a pattern. Eventually, a pattern that someone understands and repeatedly chooses not to change becomes a choice I think leaders get stuck because we keep treating choices like training problems.

We train again, we explain again, we hold another meeting, we send another message, we ask whether they understand, they say yes, then it happens again. At some point, you have to believe the behavior. And there's actually research behind this. I was reading research about accountability when preparing for this episode because I wanted to know whether what I've experienced actually lines up with what researchers have found, and it does.

Research published in the Journal of Management looked at managerial accountability and employee performance. One of the things that stood out to me was that when managers reinforce accountability, employees' own sense of accountability became part of that performance equation. Think about that, because sometimes we act like accountability is this mean thing that management does to employees.

That's not what it should be. Healthy accountability is someone understanding, "This belongs to me. I own this outcome, and I am responsible for following through." There's also some fascinating research around psychological safety, because I think we've gotten confused about what that phrase actually means.

Psychological safety does not mean nobody ever feels uncomfortable. It doesn't mean we lower the standard so nobody's feelings get hurt. , Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety has been incredibly influential in this area. And one of the things I appreciate about her work is the distinction between creating an environment where people can actually speak up, admit mistakes, and ask questions while still maintaining high performance expectations.

And I want that kind of company. I want you to be able to tell me, "Sarah Beth, I screwed this up." Okay, thank you for telling me. Now let's figure out what happened. What did we learn? How are we fixing it? What needs to change so we don't repeat it? And I've literally created this environment in my very largest brand.

I've hired almost eight hundred people over the last twelve years in nine different countries, and let me just tell you, the cultural influences that come from all of those different countries and the cultural intelligence required to actually understand all of those different kinds of personalities and create that environment did not happen overnight

This is completely different from me discovering the same mistake for the sixth time and hearing, "I forgot." Those conversations are different, and good leadership requires enough emotional intelligence to know which conversation you're actually having.

There's another side to the research that I think also matters here. Accountability can become unhealthy when leaders pile responsibility onto people without giving them resources, clarity, authority, or reasonable workloads necessary to accomplish it. So before I decide someone isn't performing, I also have to look at myself.

Did we clearly tell them what success looks like? Do they have the tools? Did we actually train them? Is the workload reasonable? Do they understand the deadline? Do they know who owns the outcome? Do they have the authority necessary to accomplish what we're asking them to accomplish? Because if the answer to those questions is no

I may not have an employee accountability problem yet. I may have a leadership problem, and that's an important distinction, I think Now I want you to think about a completely different employee. Not your struggling employee, your best one. The person who doesn't require all of this. The one who quietly does the work, the one who doesn't need you to chase them, the one who catches the problem before you do, the one who communicates, the one who says, "I've got it," and you know they got it.

How much of your leadership time are they receiving? Because something strange happens inside of companies. The person who performs gets rewarded with independence, right? While the person who doesn't perform gets rewarded with attention. Think about that. Your best employee may get five minutes with you.

Your lowest performer gets four meetings. That's backwards. Eventually, the high performer starts carrying work that somebody else didn't finish, and that's when rescuing one employee starts punishing another, and I have done that. I don't like admitting that, but I have. There have been times in my leadership when I thought I was showing somebody grace and didn't recognize that somebody else was paying for my grace.

Their coworker was finishing the work, their director was staying late, somebody else was answering the client, somebody else was fixing the mistake, somebody else was carrying the stress. That's why one of the most important questions I've learned to ask is: Who is paying for the consequence I'm removing from this person?

Because consequences don't usually disappear, they just transfer. Let me say that again because I think it's important. Consequences don't disappear just because a leader removes them. Most of the time, they transfer to somebody else The Human Side of Leadership summer series is sponsored by Dentistry Support.

Before I keep going, I want to tell you about something we've been building here. We've created a free training section on the Dentistry Support website because I wanted a place where dental practice owners, dentists, office managers, and dental leaders could go and actually learn something useful without everything immediately becoming a sales pitch.

We're talking about leadership, teams, dental practice operations, and the issues that actually happen inside of dental offices, not some sanitized version of running a practice where everybody shows up happy every morning and everything goes according to schedule. If you lead a dental office, go to Dentistry Support's website and check out the free training tab.

Read one. Send one to your office manager. Use one in your next leadership meeting. Take something from it and actually apply it to your practice. That's why we're creating it one of the hardest things for a capable leader to do is to not fix something because you know you can, and that's the problem.

I can probably do it faster. You can probably do it faster. That's how a lot of us became leaders in the first place. We figure things out. We solve problems. We become the person everybody called. Then we became the boss, and suddenly the skill that helped us become successful can become the exact skill preventing everybody around us from growing because we keep taking the work back.

Just give it to me. I'll handle it. Don't worry about it. I got it. I'll fix it. We feel productive when we do that, but we've also taught the team something. When it gets difficult enough, Sarah Beth takes it back. That is not scalable, and it definitely isn't leadership development. Sometimes I need to sit on my hands and actually let somebody else figure it out.

I'll find myself sometimes literally just, like, putting my pointer finger and my thumb around my lips and just holding my mouth shut to not say something because I know I don't need to say something. Now, I'm obviously not talking about situations where patients, compliance, clients, or the company are at risk.

I'm talking about appropriate ownership. Instead of saying, like, "Give it to me," try saying, "This belongs to you. Tell me your plan." And that's a tiny change in language with a completely different outcome Accountability doesn't require yelling. Can I just make that very clear? It doesn't require humiliation.

It doesn't require somebody leaving your office crying or hanging up crying on a call. It doesn't even require anger. Sometimes it sounds like, " We've talked about this before, so I don't wanna have the same conversation again. What are you going to do differently?" And sometimes it's, "I understand what happened.

I also need you to understand that the expectation hasn't changed." Or, " I can help you learn that skill. I can't provide the effort, though." And sometimes it's simply, " This is no longer an isolated mistake. I'm seeing a pattern, and I need you to own it." There's a quote from Brene Brown's leadership work that I think fits perfectly here.

" Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind." If you're frustrated with somebody for six months but you keep telling them everything is fine, that's not kindness. If somebody is in danger of losing their job and has absolutely no idea, if the entire team knows someone isn't performing except the person themselves because nobody has had the courage to tell them, that isn't kindness.

Give adults the dignity of knowing where they stand. Before we finish this episode, here's what I want you to take with you this week. This is our That's Good moment. I want you to think about one person you're leading. You probably already know who they are, and I want you to ask yourself one question: What am I currently carrying that actually belongs to them?

Don't immediately jump to whether you're going to fire them. That's not what I'm asking you to do. I want you to start with yourself. Have I communicated clearly? Have I trained them? Have I provided the resources? Have I explained what success looks like? Have I given reasonable support? Then comes the harder question.

If I've done those things, what consequence am I currently preventing this person from experiencing? And maybe you're reminding them every day. Maybe you're quietly correcting their work. Maybe another employee is covering for them. Maybe you've moved a deadline six times.

Maybe you're making excuses for them because you really like them. Maybe they're family. Maybe you've known them for fifteen years. Maybe you recruited them from somewhere else, and now you don't want to admit that the decision wasn't what you hoped it would be. That's okay Leadership doesn't require you to have made every decision correctly.

It requires you to be willing to correct the decisions that are not working, and this is probably the biggest lesson I've had to learn in this area. You can care deeply about somebody without carrying what belongs to them. I can love somebody. I can believe in somebody. I can root for somebody. I can give somebody an opportunity.

I can train them, support them, and open the door. Eventually, though, I have to let them decide what they're going to do once they walk through it We are almost there. Season five of No Silver Spoons is coming to an end, and our Human Side of Leadership summer series is getting very close to its final episodes.

My team is already working hard on season six, and there's so much coming that I can't wait to share with you. But before we get there, next week, we're going to turn today's conversation around because it's pretty easy to listen to an episode about accountability and immediately think about the employee who needs to hear it.

So next week, we're not talking about them, we are talking about you. Episode one thirty-nine is going to be about what happens when the person who needs to be held accountable is the leader. We're going to talk about the commitments we don't keep, the expectations we place on everybody else that we quietly excuse ourselves from, the meetings we're late for, the messages we don't answer, and the behaviors we would coach immediately if they came from somebody on our team.

We're putting the mirror back on leadership, and I think that's going to be an important conversation as we get ready to close this season. Before you go, I have to tell you about something brand new. I started another company. I know. Apparently, five companies weren't keeping me busy enough. Organic Sourdough Starter is my sixth independently owned company, and this one is completely different from the other businesses I've built, and I love that about it because it came from something I genuinely enjoy. Doing. We make dehydrated organic sourdough starter using organic flour and purified water, and I've built the brand around making sourdough approachable, beautiful, simple, and something you can actually want sitting in your kitchen.

. If you've always wanted to make sourdough, if you're already a sourdough person, or if you just want to see what in the world I decided to build this time, please visit organicsourdoughstarter.com. I'd love for you to check it out. And no, I'm not going to turn sourdough into a leadership lesson today, although I make absolutely no promises about future episodes.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. Thank you for sharing No Silver Spoons, and thank you for spending this summer talking about the human side of leadership with me. I'm Sarah Beth Herman, and this is No Silver Spoons. I'll catch you on the next episode at number one thirty-nine. Until then, remember, you are responsible for giving people clarity, opportunity, resources, support, and leadership.

 📍 You are not responsible for making their choices for them