How Accountability Can Transform Team Behavior
I heard this great story from a client the other day.
Well, it wasn’t great for him. He was dealing with a significant problem in his business.
The story is about seafood, shrink, and scorecards.
Here’s what happened.
***
I’ve written about Jared Auerbach before. He’s successfully grown his company, Red’s Best, to a massive business. He pivoted during COVID-19. He’s got a strong mission, a good team, and a smart business model.
But like every entrepreneur, he’s also got problems.
The most recent problem? Shrink.
Red’s Best buys lobsters by the pound from fishermen, then resells them.
When the pounds of lobster he sells are less than the pounds of lobster he buys, that’s called shrink.
(It happens in lots of other industries, too.)
Here’s why shrink happens in Jared’s business:
- Lobsters die during the process
- Fish and shellfish dry out and weigh less after they’ve been caught
Other reasons, too. Mistakes happen. Maybe the pounds purchased weren’t as accurate as they should have been. There are a bunch of potential reasons.
Shrink is expected, up to a point. But the shrink at Jared’s company was increasing. Far too much.
Shrink comes straight from the bottom line. It’s literally useless product they’ve purchased, and they have to eat the cost (but not the lobster).
***
How did Jared fix the shrink problem?
He could have paid a consultancy to study the problem. He could have pored over financial statements.
Instead, he went straight to the source.
Jared called his team together and told them that shrink was a problem.
He announced that they were going to start measuring shrink. Obsessively. It was going to become a primary metric for the business. And they started visibly tracking the results.
Jared called his competitors. Jared talked to his team. He said, “We have a problem with shrink. How do you think we can fix it?”
His competitors gave him a few answers, which validated some of Jared’s own data and ideas.
The team gave him half a dozen more, right off the top of their heads. When they put their attention on the problem, they realized they already had most of the solution.
A couple of examples from Jared:
- Handling the lobsters softer and with more care. Every lobster we ship gets touched at least twice (shipping and receiving). In those touches, there’s lots of room to affect their chances of living one way or the other.
- Tighter receiving. If a boat sends us bad lobsters, or has bad weighs, or even just packed them in the crates poorly, it will affect the chances of their survival. Posting the shrink metric motivates the team to speak up during receiving so we aren’t accepting bad product.
Although Jared shared those tactics with me, he also said this: “The seafood industry can be death by a thousand paper cuts…I generally just think people are more motivated to do all the little things when you show them their results. I really think the story is in the little things that I wouldn’t even notice.”
***
Sometimes you identify a problem and realize you don’t know how to quantify the solution.
That’s because you can’t systematize every element of human decision-making.
Even with the best processes and documentation, there will be room for human judgment.
And to help humans make better judgments, you need accountability.
It can almost feel magical, but it works. When we shift our focus somewhere, it creates a cascade of micro-actions that can add up to a big impact.
Now keep in mind, Jared knew that his targets for shrink were realistic. He had years of data to back up the goals he set. Accountability can work wonders, but it is not, in fact, actual magic (so don’t expect your team to hit unrealistic targets just because you set and track them.)
Why exactly did Jared’s plan work? For one main reason, or a hundred different small ones.
It’s a bit of a mystery.
But maybe in his business, and in yours, you don’t actually need to know. It’s enough, sometimes, to know that you are setting expectations for your team.
And that they are meeting them.
