 The most important thing for all of us to realize when it comes to accountability, regardless if you're talking about your children or the folks that you work with, holding someone accountable is something that you do for them. It's not something you do to them. We all have to be on the same page with that. See, a lot of people view accountability and discipline as kind of a bad thing. Like, Anna, why are you always busting my chops? Why are you always getting on me about this? Because she cares. That's why. She cares about me and she cares about the organization. Holding someone accountable is one of the highest forms of love that you can show. And I use love loosely if that's too hippie-dippy for your type of language. You can switch it. But if you want people to know in your organization that you care, you hold them accountable to the highest standards possible. Most people do that as parents because we realize it's our job to produce happy, well-adjusted, contributing citizens to this world. And in order to do that, we have to hold our kids accountable. But we don't always do that intuitively when we're talking about peers and we're talking about those that we work with. Once you've created championship-level standards that are required for your organization to be successful, then you owe it to the people that you work with and that you serve to hold them to the highest level of accountability. And what I've noticed in very average organizations, they only have vertical accountability. I'm in charge. Brian reports to me, I hold him accountable. That's the way it is. I'm here in the org chart. He's here in the org chart. I tell him what to do and make sure he does it. That's very mediocre at best. The best organizations in the world not only have vertical accountability, they have horizontal accountability, which means everyone holds everyone accountable. It doesn't matter where you are in the org chart. No one is above being held accountable, which means not only do I hold Brian accountable, he also holds me accountable. And Yannick holds you accountable, and Kendall holds you accountable, and you hold her accountable, and everyone is holding everyone else accountable. And that's something where it goes back to culture where we have to have created a safe environment built on trust and built on connection where we're able to do that. Now human nature will dictate that when someone calls you out or holds you accountable, there'll always be a brief pause where most of us will tend to be defensive, at least for a split second. We have to know that. That's just human nature. But the quicker we can transition out of that, the quicker we can take a beat and go, okay, this is not a personal attack. Brian's holding me accountable because he wants me to be the best I can be. He's holding me accountable because he cares about all of you in this room and knows that if he lets me slide, I'm letting you all down. That if I'm not the best I can be, I'm taking lunch off of each of your plates, and that's not cool, and Brian knows that. So he will hold me accountable to that. And how do we create an atmosphere where we get that type of buy-in and believe-in? We simply ask. We ask permission. One of the things that unites all of us outside of anyone that's a psychopath or a sociopath is we don't like letting others down, especially those that we care about. So it's important to us to make sure that we live up to the standards that we've agreed upon. So the key to doing that is simply asking. Now, depending on the size of your organization, it may not be realistic or feasible for everyone to ask this question, but you need to know if they could. If we were all one team, everybody in here, every single one of us should be able to ask this of anyone else in the room. Do you give me permission to hold you accountable to the standards that we've agreed upon? It's a simple yes or a no, it's a binary question. Now, I'm not trying to hand out pink slips and I'm not for mass firings, but if anyone in your organization were to answer that question with a no and say, no, Tim, you cannot hold me accountable, I think you'd need to give long, hard thought to why that person is on your team in the first place. Because selfishness or any form of it is a cancer that will erode any culture. It's not a matter of if, it's only a matter of when. So if anyone were to say, no, you cannot hold me accountable, that is a major red flag. I don't think you'll come across that. I think most people will be compliant because they want to be a part of your team. So of course they'll say yes, and now they've given you permission. They have told you, of sound mind and body, that you may hold me accountable to the standards that we've created. So if one of our standards is that we will always be on time for all functions and meetings, and Chris shows up three minutes late. One, he should expect that he's going to be held accountable by everybody in this room. And two, he really doesn't have much to say in defense because he's already given us permission to hold him accountable for that. It takes the sting out of what most people consider would be confrontation. Now it's no longer confrontation. This is business as usual because this is how we create an unbeatable team.