Customer Reviews

Keeping Employees Accountable for Results: Quick Tips for Busy Managers

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Accountability is essential to individual and organizational success, but few leaders know how to make it happen. Consequently, accountability remains at too high a level-far away from the people who really should be accountable for their work. Managers spend far too much of their valuable time chasing after details, progress reports, and hope-it-got-done worries. If there were a way to calculate the value of managerial time wasted because of our accountability deficiency, the cost would be astronomical. If you could calculate the cost to you, personally, it would far exceed the price of this book.

Miller presents his advice in a design that's easy to grasp-complete with anagram. He offers a SIMPLE system: Set expectations, Invite commitment, Measure results, Provide feedback, Link to consequences, and Evaluate effectiveness. Each of these components is explained in its own chapter, following the same format. The principle is presented, followed by an explanation of why it is important, then the how-to. Examples and checklists (good ones at the end of each chapter) strengthen the book's value.

You will gain a considerable amount of worthwhile knowledge, technique, and advice reading this book from cover to cover. However, the strongest benefit will come over time as you use this volume as a reference book, a handbook to return to for refreshers and reinforcement.

Idea: copy relevant items from the end-of-chapter checklists and use them as daily reminders that you're doing what must be done to build and maintain accountability. This is a book you'll want to keep close to your desk as an important companion.

PS-the principles will work in non-business situations, as well.

This is fantastic. Miller (great name!!) uses the same style from his first book (also good-Quick Team-building Activities for Busy Manager) and applies it to something much more important: holding your employees accountable. The book is organized so well for the busy manager, that it's almost more like an outline than a traditional book...it's easy to breeze through it, gleaming the points you need, glossing over stuff you already know (and not fear that you're missing anything). BUT, you can also dive deep into detail whenever you want it, or learn from the many examples provided. The steps here are concrete and logical. The flow makes sense...you learn quickly that this is not rocket science...or is it just that Miller knows how to make things seem simple, so the average manager "gets" it and can do it?

Like he warns in the intro, there's not a whole lot of theory here-just the how-to steps with examples and checklists of how to apply them, and then just enough theory to support them without ever bogging you down. So if you accept that up front, you wont miss the theory (which weighs down most other books on this subject, anyway). You'll just appreciate the simple process (which is cool, since he was able to make his 6 step process fit an acronym SIMPLE). If you need some help on holding your employees accountable, and you just need the quick and dirty "just tell me how to do it!" version, this is the book for you! A quick read, to the point, well organized. Miller packs a lot of punch into very few pages. A great resource for the harried manager who wants some help, but quick.

If you're about to become a manager for the first time and don't have a clue about how to get your direct reports to do what you want them to do, use this book as a step-by-step primer. It explains what to say, when to say it and how to follow up. It teaches you why meeting and connecting with employees individually is so important if you want to keep them accountable and get results. Author Brian Cole Miller's advice will help you develop your coaching skills. It will also save you a lot of headaches if you're struggling with problem employees. Miller shows you how to work with difficult employees in a way that is supportive, yet puts the ownership of results squarely on the employee's shoulders - where it belongs. If you've just promoted someone to manager, or if you are a new manager, we suggest that you make this book a part of your on-the-job training and development curriculum.

As managers, we work at top speed all the time and often we simply assume (and hope!) our employees are getting the job done. This book offers an easy to implement way to ENSURE employees are getting the job done. What a relief to have found this book. THANKS!

This is a short book on Management By Objectives (MBO). It covers goal setting, incentives, and follow up in a lot of detail but is still an easy read. If you need help coming up with well defined goals, this book provides a great set of questions that you can use to refine employee and department goals so that they are practical. The questions will speed your creation of goals.
The book doesn't cover any other management topics.

With nearly everyone being asked to do more with less, performance accountability is more important than ever.

I'm very fond of the "SIMPLE" approach prescribed in this book: "Set expectations," "Invite commitment," "Measure results," "Provide feedback," "Link to consequences," "Evaluate effectiveness." This provides a smart protocol for helping employees be count-on-able.

Direct and accurate information. Leaders will be encouraged to follow these on target suggestions for the best outcome for any employee situation.

Whenever a business author uses as an acronym for the structure of a book, I cringe, this author uses two. It is a basic primer on SMART goals and it does try to offer a step by step guide to creating effective employee goals. The book is easy to read.

However this book is too easy to read, each step is almost self-explanatory, and further explanation of the SIMPLE process is filler. There are no practical guides for determining goals. This is a book that tells you what goals should be and should not be. But if you know SMART you know this book.