Jim Bearden is a former Marine officer and an expert on accountability in leadership—and he’ll be at TEI’s 79th Annual Conference this fall. There, Bearden will engage with attendees in a keynote address and a breakout session to help them develop better, culture-focused leadership habits. In lieu of the Roundtable this issue, Sam Hoffmeister, Tax Executive managing editor, met virtually with Bearden earlier this summer to chat about his philosophies and share his invaluable insights with readers ahead of the conference.
Sam Hoffmeister: Jim, if you could please give Tax Executive readers a little background on who you are and how your experiences have led you to where you are today.
Jim Bearden: Sure. I’ve had many rich life experiences, Sam, so I’m just going to focus on a couple of roles that I’ve played: the father of three children and my tour as a Marine rifle platoon and rifle company commander in Vietnam. Those two experiences form the bases for pretty much all my thinking on leadership.
Clearly, my thinking has evolved over time. I know that leading people in the civilian world is not the same as leading people in combat, and I understand that raising children is not the same as leading people in organizational settings. But those are two life experiences on which most of my work is based.
Hoffmeister: Diving into your work, on one page of your website I noticed it mentions that you help leaders “close the gaps between what sounds good and what gets done.” Could you please speak to that a little bit? What does that mean in practice?
Bearden: After working with organizations in every industry and every size you can think of, I’ve concluded that most organizations suffer from what I call “biculture disorder.” That doesn’t mean that organizations have two cultures, but the cultures they have, what I refer to as their “actual cultures,” often bear little or no resemblance to the cultures they would like to have, what I refer to as their “professed cultures.”
Professed cultures are expressed in words and phrases usually found in foundational documents, things like core values and mission statements. And those words and phrases have two things in common: 1) They all sound good, and 2) they have little or no impact on employee behavior.
The Wells Fargo debacle a few years ago provides an example of biculture disorder. Between 2002 and 2016, Wells Fargo employees provided millions of accounts to customers under false pretenses or without consent. Wells Fargo was fined $3 billion, and more than 5,000 employees were fired. In his testimony before Congress, the then CEO made a statement that speaks to this distinction between the professed and the actual cultures. Referring to the behavior of the terminated employees, he said that their actions were “totally contrary to our culture.” My point is if it had been totally contrary to their actual culture, it never would have happened.
When he said it was inconsistent with their culture, the one he was talking about was their professed culture (the good-sounding words and phrases in their core values and mission statements). The behavior of those terminated employees was consistent with and supported by the bank’s actual culture, which was driven by the behavior of people in leadership positions.
When we talk about closing the gaps between what sounds good and what gets done, we can look at some fairly common words that are found in organizations’ foundational documents, words like “teamwork,” “service,” “collaboration,” “innovation.” In most organizations, that’s about as far as the leadership goes to defining the behavior they expect. They expect “more teamwork.” Let me ask you this: If I were to take ten employees of any organization and sit them down, give them a blank piece of paper with “teamwork” written at the top of it, and ask them to describe the behaviors they would see as examples of teamwork, how many descriptions would we get? We’d probably get ten, or maybe some wise guy would have two, so we’d get eleven or twelve.
My point here is that words like “teamwork” sound good because most leaders see teamwork having lots of intrinsic value. But few of those leaders invest much effort in defining teamwork behavior.
When I’m working as a consultant or a coach with clients, and teamwork is the topic, I’ll ask them to begin by identifying three or four situations in which they think teamwork would be especially important in their departments. I then ask them to pick one of those situations, and to describe the behavior (things they expect people to do) they would see as examples or expressions of teamwork in that situation. Most clients find this step very challenging, because most of them, even those in very high leadership positions, have relied almost exclusively on employees to translate words like “teamwork” into specific behavior. And then those leaders become confused and frustrated about the unmet need for more “teamwork.” That’s a long-winded answer. The point is this biculture disorder bites them all in the backside.
Hoffmeister: So, to become an effective leader, that takes accountability and making the effort to create that resonant culture, the real culture. Why are accountability and effort so important to successful leadership?
Bearden: I think there are two basic forms of accountability: behavioral accountability and the one that I focus on a lot, emotional accountability.
For me, leadership is a two-dimensional discipline—the mental and the mechanical. In my opinion, the mental drives the mechanical. The mental dimension is the more powerful because it forms the basis for the things that we say and the way we say them and the things we do and the way we do them.
I define emotional accountability this way: acknowledged ownership of the mental choices we make and of the emotional consequences those choices produce. There is emotional accountability and its far more common counterpart, emotional victimhood.
Emotional victimhood is based on a mistaken belief that goes something like this: My feelings are the emotional consequences of the hands I’m dealt. Now, none of us would quarrel with the fact that the hands we’re dealt do have impacts on us. They do matter. But in our more lucid moments, we would probably also acknowledge the choices we make about the hands we’re dealt matter more. The ultimate impact of the bad hands we’re dealt, for example, is really going to be determined by the thoughts that we have about them, the meanings that we assign to them, e.g., what they mean about us, about our future, about our relationships, whatever.
In the real world, setbacks—bad hands—are inevitable. A point I make with leaders around this notion of emotional accountability is that setbacks provide difficult, but excellent, opportunities, for leaders to model emotional accountability as a compelling alternative to emotional victimhood.
I often use the first few lines in Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If—” to make a point. The first couple of lines go like this: “If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you.” After reading these lines, I encourage clients to consider an alternative wording that goes like this: “If you’re willing to keep your head about you.” The question isn’t, Can you make different (better) mental choices? The question is, Will you?
Everything in our culture seems to support the victim perspective on life (emotional victimhood). Since their behavior (the things they say and do) is so influential over the choices that other people make, I encourage leaders to become more conscious or aware of what’s going on in their heads, the mental choices they make and the emotional consequences those choices produce.
In addition to the definition I shared earlier, here’s another point I make about emotional accountability: It is not a trait to be developed. It’s a truth to be acknowledged. We already are—and always have been—making mental choices (thoughts) that create and feed (intensify and prolong) our negative feelings about bad hands we’re dealt. We don’t need to learn how to do it; we just need to learn how to do it differently and then be willing to do so.
Hoffmeister: It’s choosing a path, isn’t it? Do I want to just fall victim, pout, let this get to me, let that bleed out to the rest of the culture? Or do I want to take it by the horns, be emotionally accountable, be there for my team, and be mindful of how any setback is going to ultimately bring you out into the right space?
Bearden: Absolutely. The first step toward making better mental choices is to simply observe the stories that we start to tell ourselves when people, situations, or events don’t play out the way we’d hoped, to just acknowledge (be mindful of) the things the voices in our heads are saying.
Most of us have established some pretty hard-and-fast rules for what must or must not happen in our lives for us to be happy. For leaders, many of those rules apply to the things that people must or must not say or do. The people part of leadership is extremely challenging. Not only are all the people on your team different, but individual team members can also be different from one day to the next depending on what’s going on in their lives.
When we’re dealt a bad hand, when people behave in ways that are contrary to one of our rules, the victim perspective leads us to make victim choices. We blame, wallow, quit, wait, wish, and hope for those people to do “the right thing.” Or we try to control people and situations, which—as those of us who are parents have learned—is an exercise in futility.
People using what I call the heroic perspective, characterized by emotional accountability, make different choices about the bad hands they’re dealt. Instead of blaming, wallowing, and quitting, they get over it and get on with it. They acknowledge the bad hands they’re dealt and do some appropriate rational grieving. I don’t expect people to be happy about a bad hand they’re dealt. Grieving is appropriate in such situations, so long as it is appropriate and it’s rational grieving.
Being disappointed is a perfect example of an appropriate, rational response to a bad hand you’ve been dealt. Devastation, on the other hand, is neither. People who make that choice are usually too busy wallowing in their devastation to do much about the bad hand they’ve been dealt.
In my keynote presentation I’ll offer additional thoughts about the distinctions between emotional accountability and emotional victimhood in a section titled “Heroes and Victims: A Tale of Two Perspectives.”
Hoffmeister: What advice would you have for somebody to get that ear of another leader or get the seat at the table when it comes to making a business decision?
Bearden: Those who want a “seat at the table,” to be included in collaborative decision-making, must be viewed as solution finders, not just problem finders.
Look, finding problems is extremely important. Identifying processes, procedures, and practices that have lost some of their effectiveness is a legitimate starting place for finding better ways. That doesn’t mean you limit your search to processes that are broken and need to be fixed. I strongly encourage clients to look for processes that are working OK but could work better with some tweaks. Finding the problems or potential problems is just the first step.
I would tell the people who want to be heard to start by identifying what they see as problems and then provide additional information, including:
- whats—the problem and a solution they think might work;
- whys—the value of the solution they’re offering; why it’s a better—and not just a different—process, practice, or procedure; and
- hows—the steps they think will be necessary to implement the solution they’ve offered.
If you can come to the person at the head of the table with that information—and not just what you see as the problem—you’ve got a shot at being seen as a solution finder and being offered a seat at the table.
From the other side of the desk, let’s say you have an employee who is good at bringing problems to your attention (often late on Friday afternoons). Here are some ways I encourage leadership clients to respond to chronic problem finders:
- “This sounds like something that you see as a problem. What I’m hearing you say is you think there probably are some things we could do differently that might produce better results. Is that what you’re saying?”
- If the answer is yes: “I appreciate you identifying areas for making improvements. I’d like to sit down with you on (pick a day the following week), and here’s what I’d like for you to share with me:
- what you see as the costs of this problem, how it’s impacting us negatively;
- what you see as a solution, the alternative you suggest we consider and try;
- what you see as the benefits of that alternative, the things that make it better than what we’ve got right now, the value we would derive from implementing it; and
- finally, two or three steps you think we need to take to implement your suggested solution.
- “I have great confidence that you’re going to be able to come back to me with that sort of information, and at that point we can dig down deeper into it. Have a great weekend.”
The point I want to make is, I don’t want problem finders. What I want are solution finders. I want people who take the initiative to come to me with problems to also include some thoughts about solutions. And that would be the answer to that question, “How do I get a seat at the table?” Act like you belong there.
Hoffmeister: What can TEI members expect from you at the conference this fall?
Bearden: In a nutshell, I am not big on leadership theory, philosophy, or concepts. I believe that people come to conferences like this for some tools they can take back with them to their departments and use. They want to know what they can do to function more effectively in the leadership roles they occupy or aspire to.
And so, what they can expect are some very specific leadership behaviors. In my keynote presentation I’ll introduce four specific leadership behaviors, and in my breakout session we’ll work on adapting those behaviors to situations participants encounter in their departments.
The first of those four leadership behaviors is ensuring that people understand what they’re expected to do. This goes back to the professed culture, where people preach about teamwork and collaboration and things like that, but nobody ever gets around to defining teamwork or collaborative behaviors. There are two approaches to ensuring that people understand what they’re expected to do.
The first is what I would call a more directive approach. In this approach, leaders define and describe the specific things they expect people to do in specific situations. There are certainly times where that would be the appropriate approach, but I think those are the exception rather than the rule.
The alternative is the collaborative approach. In this approach leaders obtain employees’ input on leadership by breaking it down into a series of segments or components.
For example, give participants a week or so to identify one or two situations in which they think more support and cooperation from other members of the department (teamwork) would be especially helpful to them. If there are five people at the table, you might get five different situations, assuming there’s no redundancy.
The next order of business is to have the participants pick one of those situations, the one on which the group will focus going forward. Here is a very important consideration from my perspective as the leadership development coach: bite-sized chunks.
Every member of your department, including (especially) you, are all very busy people. Anything participants do to address the culture is not in lieu of, but in addition to, the operational tasks they must perform. What I see happening too often is people will say we want more teamwork, accountability, collaboration, and innovation. They identify those four broad types of behavior, and they want to address all four at the same time. How many of them get done? In most instances, none of them get done, because everybody is very busy and trying to make improvements in four areas simultaneously. Pick one!
Sane facilitators set the stage for successful collaborative processes by setting realistic objectives. They pick one topic (e.g., teamwork) and one situation in which teamwork is especially important. Some participants will certainly believe that the topics and situations they’ve identified are the most important, but the facilitators continue working until the participants agree on the one topic and one situation.
Here’s the bottom line on realistic objectives: Even if it takes longer than they’d expected to get more of the behavior they expect, e.g., teamwork, in the situation they’ve identified, leaders and other participants will see it as time and effort well spent. It is a compelling alternative to biting off more than they can chew and making no progress. Not only is that approach a waste of time and effort, but it is also demoralizing to those who stepped up to participate.
So, the first leadership behavior is: Ensure that others understand the things they’re expected to do.
The second leadership behavior is: Measure performance using expectations as the standard. I call it “doing timely, aggressive follow-up.” If you’ve defined—or facilitated a collaborative process for defining—the things people are expected to do, but you don’t measure performance (efforts to meet expectations), what message are you sending? Seems to me that in the absence of measuring performance, the message is that performance is discretionary. What gets measured gets done.
The third leadership behavior is: Honor efforts and progress made toward meeting expectations. In the early stages of implementation, especially if what’s being implemented are new or different behaviors, what you measure is the quality of participants’ efforts, with less emphasis on the quality of their performance. Quality effort almost always precedes quality performance. Effective leaders honor the quality of effort without blowing smoke about the quality of performance.
If the quality of participants’ performance isn’t up to where you and they want it to be, don’t tell them that it is; they know it’s not. Instead, make some reference to the fact that while you know that the quality of their performance isn’t yet up to their high standards, you wanted them to know that you know that the quality of effort they’re making is commendable. Tell them that it’s the kind of thing that you expect from a team player and assure them that if they persist with that quality of effort, the quality of performance will improve.
The fourth leadership behavior is: Confront unwillingness, bad faith. Here are two key points I make about what I call “restorative confrontation”: 1) We never confront people; we confront the choices people make. And 2) we never confront to punish; we confront to restore the people’s willingness to make good-faith efforts to meet expectations.
Hoffmeister: Finally, give some readers a little bit more insight into Jim the person. What do you do outside of work? What do you do for fun?
Bearden: I’m happy to. My one hobby or pastime is golf. I am not a very good golfer, but I play usually about three times a week. I’m at a stage in my life where I can do that. I find that golf is a great metaphor for life in that it gives me great opportunities to work on acknowledging my tendencies toward emotional victimhood. I’m amazed at how much time I spend in a bad state of mind on the golf course because I’m so mad about having hit bad shots. Imagine that. Somebody said something to me once that really resonated. He said, “You’re not good enough to get mad. If you were a professional or PGA guy, maybe so. But c’mon. You stink.” Anyway, I love playing golf.
We have three children. They are the joy of our lives. They’re all three grown, all have families of their own. We always enjoy spending time with our kids (adult children).
My wife, Barbara, and I started our speaking business in 1987. She runs the business, and I get to do the fun part. It’s worked out great, because she is extremely organized and good with numbers and administrative details. She handles all the administrative and financial aspects of the business, and I get to do the writing, speaking, and coaching.
We have a group of close friends, and during football season we host gatherings to watch our Longhorns play. Barb plays team tennis and has started playing pickleball at our club.
That’s kind of what we do. That’s our life.
Hoffmeister: This has been excellent. Thank you so much for your time, Jim.
