Linda Galindo left college as a junior to take a radio reporting job. Years later, that choice caught up with her when healthcare clients asked for a CV full of degrees she didn’t have. She explains why she now calls it her favorite mistake. She also defines accountability as ownership without fault, blame, or guilt, and she pushes back on Mark about whether nurses can be held accountable for speaking up.
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My guest for Episode #372 of the My Favorite Mistake podcast is Linda Galindo. She’s a keynote speaker, executive coach, and president of Galindo Consulting, and she describes herself as a fierce advocate for personal accountability. She is the author of The 85% Solution and Way to Grow!, co-author of Where Winners Live, and author of her newest book, Accountability Thieves: How the Unaccountable Run Our Lives and What to Do About It.
Linda’s favorite mistake is not finishing college. As a junior studying broadcast journalism, she was recruited for a radio reporting job and took it. That led to 11 years in radio, including time as a top-rated morning news anchor in Salt Lake City. When she later moved into consulting and speaking, healthcare clients asked for a CV and continuing-education credentials, and the education section was blank. For years she saw that as a costly mistake. She explains why she now sees it differently: without a degree, she never absorbed the assumptions that people with business or medical degrees tend to take for granted, and that gave her room to build a different way of thinking about accountability.
That thinking took shape in her journalism career. In story after story, leaders embraced accountability when things went well and deflected it when they didn’t. Linda defines personal accountability as “ownership for results, good or bad, without fault, blame, or guilt.” In our conversation, she explains the “as long as” blind spot that keeps people from full ownership. She also describes how managers who rescue, fix, and save underperformers end up undermining their best people, and why she tells CEOs who want more accountability from their teams that they are the problem.
We also disagree, respectfully, about healthcare. Linda argues that complexity becomes an excuse. I push back that a nurse can’t fairly be held accountable for staying silent when speaking up to a bullying surgeon carries real risk. Where we land is that leaders have to invite people to speak up and then reward them when they do.
What You’ll Learn
- Why Linda calls leaving college for a radio job her favorite mistake, and what it cost her when healthcare clients asked for her credentials
- How watching advertisers shape a newsroom’s story lineup pushed her out of journalism and into accountability work
- Her definition of personal accountability, and why it shouldn’t change depending on whether things are going well or badly
- Why “we need to hold people accountable” often means blame, and why Linda tells CEOs who ask for more accountability that they are the problem
- The “as long as” blind spot: “I’m 100% committed, as long as…”
- How rescuing, fixing, and saving underperformers punishes high performers and quietly demeans the people being rescued
- Where Mark and Linda disagree on whether a nurse can be held accountable for not speaking up when retaliation is a real risk
- A four-minute team reflection exercise: what I did, what I learned, what I’ll do differently, and how I’m accountable
About Linda Galindo
Linda Galindo is a keynote speaker, executive coach, and consultant who helps leaders and leadership teams build accountable organizations. She is president of Galindo Consulting Inc., based in the San Francisco Bay Area, and works with corporations, healthcare systems, and executive teams. Before consulting, she spent 11 years in radio journalism covering government and business. She is the author of The 85% Solution: How Personal Accountability Guarantees Success — No Nonsense, No Excuses (Jossey-Bass, 2009) and Way to Grow!, co-author with Dave Porter of Where Winners Live, and author of Accountability Thieves.
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Full Transcript: Linda Galindo on Personal Accountability Without Blame
Meet Linda Galindo
Mark Graban: Hi, welcome to My Favorite Mistake. I’m your host, Mark Graban. Our guest today is Linda Galindo. She describes herself as a fierce advocate for personal accountability. She has spent more than 30 years as a keynote speaker, consultant, and executive coach, working with corporations, healthcare systems, and leadership teams.
She runs Galindo Consulting out of the San Francisco Bay Area. Before that, she was a journalist covering government and business, where she says the underlying issue in story after story was the same: nobody was accountable. She is the author of a new book called Accountability Thieves. We’ll talk about that today.
She was previously also the author of The 85% Solution and Way to Grow. So Linda, thanks so much for being here. How are you?
Linda Galindo: I’m great. I’m really excited to be here. Thank you for this idea that you had to do this topic.
Mark Graban: Maybe we’ll hear some of your thought process for how you came to develop your answer to the question. I’ll just jump in, and you can tell the story and then maybe the thought process, or however you want to share it. What’s your favorite mistake?
Her Favorite Mistake: Not Finishing College
Linda Galindo: Not finishing college. Not getting a college degree is my favorite mistake.
Mark Graban: So you didn’t get a degree in journalism?
Linda Galindo: I did not.
Mark Graban: So tell us what happened and how you’ve come to see that as a mistake, let alone a favorite mistake.
Linda Galindo: Back in the day when I was in college, dropping out of college to start something — like people we know today who were at Stanford or big schools and are now gabillionaires — that was not a thing to do. It was, “Get a college degree. It’s important.” No one in my family had done it.
I got accepted to college. I thought I wanted to go into business, but while I was in college I changed to communications, and broadcast journalism really caught my attention. I worked on the student station first, and then I had a mentor who said, “Boy, you’ve got natural talent. You’re awesome.” I was a junior, hating school except for the broadcast journalism stuff. I didn’t like all the other things you had to do. And I got recruited to a station. It was in my junior year, and I took the job.
Mark Graban: Is this radio or television?
Linda Galindo: It was radio. I wanted to do radio. I thought it was so fascinating how radio worked, and I was very interested in the journalism and news that I was learning. So I got this opportunity to leave, and I enjoyed the progression in my career in radio without having a college degree.
When the Missing Degree Became a Problem
Linda Galindo: However, when I decided to leave broadcast journalism and do what I’m doing now, I ran into a huge problem that told me not finishing school was a mistake. A lot of the speaking engagements were in healthcare. And when you have a speaking engagement in healthcare, they ask you for your CV.
Mark Graban: Mm-hmm.
Linda Galindo: And the first thing on it is all your education — college and so on. And I’m like, “N/A, N/A, N/A.” I thought, “Oh my gosh, this is going to really limit my ability to get these gigs,” because they were awarding continuing education credits, and you had to have all of that. It’s like, “Here’s my topic,” but none of that was there. So at the time, it was a big mistake.
However, it turned into my favorite mistake after talking to you and listing all my other mistakes and trying to choose. Because had I finished college, I would not have had the naivety to create something outside of the construct that you have to have a business degree, or a medical degree, or some kind of degree. When I’d look at the backgrounds of most of the people I was talking to, what they did wasn’t what they studied in college.
So I started to realize, boy, if you really listen and have the experience — and from the experience, facts are facts — you can start to build your case for what you’re doing. And no one ever says, “Well, what were your grades?”
Mark Graban: Yeah.
Linda Galindo: Or, “Hey, in your master’s degree, what were your grades?” What came out of that was that I saw the disconnect between people who had mostly academic backgrounds versus people who had actual experience. I’ve been doing this almost 30 years now, and I spent several years early on thinking what a mistake it was that I didn’t finish college. I even made a second attempt at finishing college.
Mark Graban: I was going to ask, did you go back?
Linda Galindo: No. When I was making the second attempt, I thought, “Oh my gosh, this is so disconnected from the real world.” When you’ve been in the real world and then you have to go back and tick these boxes — no. It was bad.
Even some mentors I had, when I was filling out the CV, would ask how to make it look like something better than what it actually was. The only thing that was going to build it at that point was time.
Mark Graban: Mm-hmm.
Linda Galindo: And you don’t have that kind of time when you need to make money. So it just kind of forced me. And then all of a sudden, dropping out became the popular thing to do: drop out of school and just make something up. But that isn’t exactly how it went for me.
It also informed my approach with my two daughters going to college, something I wanted to pass on to them. Whether they’ve taken it or not remains to be seen, but they’re both out of school.
Mark Graban: Out of school meaning they graduated?
Linda Galindo: They graduated. Both are at the master’s degree level. And the master’s degree thing was another eye-opener. In my consulting, I worked with so many people who didn’t have master’s degrees and wanted to move on to the next thing, but the job posting said, “Must have a master’s degree.”
Mark Graban: Mm-hmm.
Linda Galindo: And they were way smarter by experience than the people with the master’s degrees. It was fascinating to me. So I saw it as less and less of a mistake, and more as my favorite thing that I chose to do.
From Reporter to Top-Rated News Anchor
Mark Graban: A couple of questions. Were you working for a news station or a public radio station when you were doing journalism and radio?
Linda Galindo: I loved it to death. The first job I took was as a reporter for a radio station that was a music station with news on the hour. I just loved it. You go out and interview, you cover government, you do specialty stories.
Then I got laid off 18 months into that first job. So here I’d left college, and 18 months in, I get laid off. Last hired, first let go when the ratings drop. I didn’t know any of that stuff; I was just learning on the fly.
But then the top station in that market heard that I wasn’t with that station anymore. I had no idea anybody was even listening to me. They hired me and made me an anchor in nothing flat. I did morning drive, and we were the top station in the market. I was the news personality. I didn’t even know that at the time.
Mark Graban: What market was this?
Linda Galindo: This was in Utah — Salt Lake City. I was from California, but I moved for that. We built the first morning show with a news personality. And just before I was going on to the next biggest market — this was year 11 of my total time in broadcast radio journalism — a change happened that led to my fourth favorite mistake.
The Ethics Shift That Pushed Her Out of Journalism
Linda Galindo: The change was that when you’re doing news at a commercial radio station, they started deciding your story lineup based on advertisers. So if an advertiser was in trouble — like a bank — the sales director would go to the news director and say, “You can’t do stories about this because they advertise on our station.”
Mark Graban: Is there supposed to be a line? In newspapers, there’s a difference between the publisher and the editor, and there’s supposed to be a hard line. But you’re saying in radio, no?
Linda Galindo: Back in the day, that’s when that sea change happened. That’s when you learned this is not objective — who, what, when, where, why. So I said, “Well, wait a minute. What do you mean?” I realized they were going to pull stories when it was negative about an advertiser. So I called the station I was going to and asked, “What is the policy there?”
And they said, “Oh, it’s funny you’d ask. We’re moving to that.” That’s when it happened, back in the day.
Mark Graban: Yeah.
Linda Galindo: And I said, “I’m out,” so I left.
Mark Graban: A journalistic ethics sea change.
Linda Galindo: And it’s going on to this day, by the way. With commercial radio and commercial anything — I haven’t watched a newscast since then, ever.
Mark Graban: Wow.
Linda Galindo: I’ve listened to public radio, but they’re starting to move there too. You’ll notice there’s a lot of “By the way, Google funds us,” and so on.
Mark Graban: I listen to NPR a lot, and they’ll report on a story involving, say, a big lawsuit against Meta. I feel like they’re doing a straight job with the news, reporting on negative things, and then saying, “By the way, Meta is a financial sponsor.” I think the implication is that they’re doing the story in spite of them being a financial supporter.
Linda Galindo: And we have to be accountable for our consumption now way more than we ever have before. There are outlets we can find now, like Ground News, and all kinds of things you can go to where they’re not beholden at all. It’s just like not taking PAC money. I’m not beholden at all.
Why Accountability Changes Depending on the Outcome
Linda Galindo: Getting out of journalism spawned my business of accountability and that focus. Because in every story about a CEO doing something great, they had no trouble understanding accountability at all. Zero.
Mark Graban: Yeah.
Linda Galindo: “It’s mine. Totally, it’s me. I’m going to be in In Search of Excellence. I’m going to write a book.” But when there was a problem, the story would go on and on because there was no accountability. “Why are you asking me? I’m not an accountant. I can’t know what 100,000 people are doing.”
And I thought, “This is really interesting — the definition of accountability changes depending on whether things are working or not working.”
Mark Graban: Yeah.
Linda Galindo: What if that wasn’t the case? What if accountability has the exact same definition whether things are working or not, and that’s when you would actually learn from your mistakes? It all started to gel together, because one of your statements is owning and learning from mistakes.
Mark Graban: Sure.
Linda Galindo: So accountability is ownership, upfront, before you do anything. If that’s really high, then you can predict the outcome. But if it’s low, it’s not going to work.
Defining Personal Accountability: Ownership Without Blame
Mark Graban: So how do you define accountability? Because that word gets used a lot. Before I let you answer with your definition — I hear it used, and this happens a lot in healthcare, in a context where something bad happens and leaders say, “We’ve got to hold those people accountable.” What they really mean is, “We’re going to blame and punish those people.”
Linda Galindo: Yeah.
Mark Graban: I don’t think that’s really accountability. But how do you define the word?
Linda Galindo: Ownership for results, good or bad, without fault, blame, or guilt. Ownership for results, good or bad, without fault, blame, or guilt. But the word you have to put in front of it in order for me to come in and do the work I do is “personal.” Personal accountability.
That’s the book The 85% Solution, because I developed a methodology to determine the level of personal accountability in someone’s mindset before I start the work. Imagine walking into a group of thoracic surgeons when the topic is accountability, because the organization wants accountability in the practice. It’s like saying, “I’m here to do accountability training,” which implies what? You’re not accountable.
So I had to figure that out after several mistakes — not my favorite mistakes — of walking into a group where I was hired to fix them. I thought, “Hold on a second. They’re tearing me apart. I’ve got to understand how they’re thinking about it before I go in.”
Mark Graban: Right.
Linda Galindo: So The 85% Solution was born after developing this assessment for 11 years, then getting it validated. Then I could say, “Okay, now I can see where to start, where they are,” whether it’s thoracic surgeons, rocket scientists, or a staff-level billing department. I can take a peek at where we’re starting so that I can put the framework of accountability in place. And for some people, the assessment says, “Don’t go in there. It’s not going to work.”
“Then You’re the Problem”: When CEOs Ask for Accountability
Mark Graban: I love your definition of accountability, because in the hospital scenario of a leader who says, “We’re going to hold them accountable,” it sounds like, by your definition, that leader is not being accountable. They are deflecting and blaming others. It’s accountability for thee, but not for me.
That happens in other industries too. You mentioned a bank. I think of the Wells Fargo scandal some years ago, where across the country — I would argue this is a very systemic problem — bankers and bank branch managers, in a very widespread way, were setting up unauthorized accounts for customers. The executives had set unrealistic quotas of eight accounts for every customer. And then Wells Fargo responded by basically blaming and firing all of these, quote-unquote, “unethical people.” I would step back and ask, “Who takes accountability for hiring a bank full of unethical people?”
Linda Galindo: Well, I think we’re about to go through the 2008 financial crisis again. That’s my prediction, because the instigators of the 2008 debacle — all the banks and so on — were not held accountable. You’re hearing the same terms again, like credit default swaps. None of that was changed, and the bonuses were gigantic.
So basically they wrote the playbook to do it again with the AI stuff coming up. That’s just a prediction of mine.
Mark Graban: Yeah.
Linda Galindo: At the end of the day, all I can do is go where I’m invited, and that’s all I’ve been doing. Every time I mention what I do to someone, they’ll say, “Oh, I know someone who really needs that. My boss could really use that. They don’t hold people accountable here.”
So when I get the phone call, usually it’s from an HR department looking for accountability training, which I do not do.
Mark Graban: Right.
Linda Galindo: I do leadership education so they can make a decision about whether they really want to do this or not, because there are a whole bunch of downsides to being an accountable organization. But if you really want to do this, the only thing it will deliver to your culture is low stress, productivity, and job satisfaction.
So when I get the call from an HR or training organization in a company, I say, “Let me talk to the CEO.” I’ll ask, “CEO, tell me what it is you want to have happen.” “I want my people to be accountable. Sitting in the room, the vice presidents are finger-pointing and blaming, and they’re not hitting their marks.”
And I’ll say, “Okay, so you want more accountability on their part?” “Yes.” “Then you’re the problem.”
Mark Graban: How do they like hearing that?
Linda Galindo: Hold up. I say, “Yeah, 100%, you’re the problem. And if you’re willing to go down that road with the work I do, I can guarantee my result. I can guarantee it. But if you’re not, I’m not your person to come in and do this.”
Mark Graban: It’s almost human nature for people to want to say the problem is somewhere else. I’m pointing in two different directions here. Leaders don’t like hearing that, but I guess if they say, “Linda, goodbye,” you’re like, “Okay, that’s fine. That would’ve been frustrating and not led to anything good anyway.” You work with the willing.
Rescue, Fix, and Save: How Managers Undermine Accountability
Linda Galindo: And if they say yes and I do the assessment, sometimes I have to make the phone call to say, “This assessment I’ve just done on your leadership group of 15 says that my work isn’t going to work for you. So I’m not taking this engagement.” And they’re like, “What? I can’t believe it. What should we do?”
I say, “You need to become well-managed. You’re not even well-managed.”
What does that mean? That you’re rescuing, fixing, and saving underperformance instead of holding people accountable. People are talking about each other instead of to each other. They’re having meetings after the meeting, the unproductive ones. The basics of an accountable culture are not even there.
Mark Graban: Mm-hmm.
Linda Galindo: And you’re rewarding it. You get high performers in and then give them the work of the underperformer instead of holding the underperformer accountable. All these little insidious, subtle things in your culture rob it of accountability.
And it’s so demeaning when you don’t hold people accountable and you work around them. You treat them like they’re not capable, and you give their work to someone else. It just robs the whole culture of accountability over and over again. And they’re like, “Huh.”
Then I’ll ask, “How is the CEO of this organization, or the vice president of this division, described?” Usually it’s something like, “Really a nice guy.” I know what the problem is right off: you’re not holding people accountable. You want to be liked more than you want to be effective.
Mark Graban: Yeah.
Linda Galindo: None of those things were in the business books I would have studied had I stayed in school and gotten a business degree. That’s where I leap over all of that and say, “No, this is 100% not built on a foundation of accountability — personally first.”
A Fresh Perspective Without the Corporate Assumptions
Mark Graban: I wanted to come back to something you said earlier. About not having a degree, I think you used the word naive. We could also say you had a fresh perspective, and your head wasn’t filled with the typical corporate nonsense that becomes accepted as the way we’ve always done it, or the way it has to be.
Where did your approach and your views come from? What is this view of accountability grounded in? It’s not something you learned in business school. Was it part of your upbringing? I’m just curious — do these principles just seem natural to you?
Linda Galindo: No. It started when I left radio and had to do something. I joined up with another person who was looking to do something different and get out of what they were doing, and they were very much into the human potential movement. I’m going to date myself, but this was right around 1985, when the Hudson Institute published a study saying the net new entrants in the workplace between 1985 and 2000 were going to be women, minorities, and immigrants.
Mark Graban: Mm-hmm.
Linda Galindo: So it was like, “Oh, wow, managing and valuing differences is going to be a huge thing.” We got together and started creating programs on how to manage and value differences.
In that process, I was working with women and minorities who were mostly treated as commodities, and they were not staying in their organizations because the culture wasn’t a fit. So you’ve got all these people coming in, but they’re not staying. You’ve got to teach the organization how to manage and value differences.
And the government was awarding huge contracts for retention programs for PhD candidates coming in in droves. So it was a cultural thing, and we could create a program. We did. But then I noticed that the program wasn’t teaching the women and minorities in particular — or the main power groups at the top — that ultimately, it’s your personal accountability to be successful. The program isn’t going to solve for that. It’s education, but it’s not going to solve for that.
You might have a realization about how you’re not valuing a difference and get better at that. But at the end of the day, the individual has to care. Many of them didn’t care. They were checking a box that said, “We did the program. Give us the grant money.” You’ve got to care.
So I started to really camp on the idea that the higher your level of personal accountability, the more you could use what’s around you. And if you change in that regard, your environment doesn’t have a choice. It has to start responding to you differently.
Mark Graban: Yeah.
Linda Galindo: Little did I know, but The 85% Solution was germinating then, along with the other idea I had: why do people understand accountability when something works, but suddenly they’re confused when it doesn’t?
The 85% Solution and the “As Long As” Blind Spot
Mark Graban: So tell us more about the book The 85% Solution — the idea that as an individual, you’re at least 85% responsible for your outcomes. Where does the 85% number come from? I realize it might be kind of a guesstimate, or a direction.
Linda Galindo: It’s a data-driven fact.
Mark Graban: Okay. Even better.
Linda Galindo: Even better. On a scale of zero to 100%, every one of us has 100% personal accountability available to us as a theoretical limit. Start there.
To put that in context — why does that matter, why do I care? Let’s say you were going to have surgery, and you’re the person on the table, which I never want for anyone in this listening audience. But let’s say it’s you, and before the surgery started, you got to ask every person, with eye contact, “On a scale of zero to 100%, how much personal accountability are you taking for this being a good outcome?” What answer do you want from each person who’s going to be involved in your surgery?
Mark Graban: I want them to say 100%.
Linda Galindo: 100%. That means, “I take a paycheck in my role to own the role, be clear about the role, interdepend with these people, and understand what we’re doing at this moment in service to you as the patient, in exchange for our pay.”
So you’d think 100%. But here’s what you’ll hear: “For my part, 100. I can’t control these other people, however, and this surgeon does not like to do the checklist before we get started.” Or, “I’m here for you, but I can’t control these other people.” Or someone says, “For my part — they changed the reward, so we got wheels in on time, and most of the instruments are clean. But I’m here for you. I did my part.”
So the premise is that, through the assessment I do, I can tell where you’re starting from, because people hold it like this: “I’m 100%, as long as…” As long as. Whether it’s 75% or whatever’s getting measured in the assessment, it’s telling me the blind spot people have in the “as long as,” and you can predict that upfront.
Think about what we have to do in our lives day to day. You buy a ticket, and the airline says, “Thank you for choosing our airline. We’re flying to Kansas, and we’re going to land at this time.” You get on the plane assuming that’s what’s going to happen. You’re assuming the mindset of the person providing the service is 100-zero for their role, and that it interdepends with everybody else’s 100-zero, so they hold each other accountable.
Mark Graban: Right.
Linda Galindo: In most cultures I go into, it might be maybe 75%, on average. Right now, a lot of the organizations I’m working with start at 72%, which means fairly receptive to the idea. At 70%, they’re not receptive at all, and they don’t take the work.
Mark Graban: Wow.
Linda Galindo: So you have to start with where they are, and whether they’ll do the things necessary to say, “Let me stop blaming everybody outside of me for my lack of success in the work I do.” Because you’re not wrong about the “as long as” — as long as you’re nice to me, as long as they’re clear, as long as I get this. You stop all that nonsense and say, “I own this role, and that’s what I’m here to do,” interdepending with these other people.
Mark Graban: Yeah.
Linda Galindo: Then the culture becomes: I talk to you, not about you. I don’t have unproductive meetings after the meeting, or during the meeting in IM chats. I don’t rescue, fix, and save underperformance. I hold people accountable like they’re adults. The assessment serves as a heat map, as it were. Where’s the big hole, individually and collectively?
If you can bump it to 85 — people ask, “Why isn’t it the 100% solution?” Here’s why: because on this planet, stuff happens. COVID. But at 85% or higher, it predicts people will do what you talk about: own and learn from mistakes. At 85%, that’s the culture you’re going to have. Own and learn from mistakes.
Systems, Checklists, and Accountability in Healthcare
Mark Graban: I think healthcare struggles to find the balance between looking at the impact of systems that either support or don’t support the surgeons and others doing the work, versus personal accountability. I love this phrase and this check of “as long as.”
You mentioned checklists. I’m passionate about that because, A, I fly a lot, and B, I’ve done work in healthcare. If I were going to have surgery, I absolutely want the surgeon leading the team through a checklist — not just going through the motions, but really doing it well. I feel more confident that the pilot is doing the checklist on a plane because they go down with the plane, unlike the surgeon. The surgeon doesn’t also die from a surgical error that could kill the patient. So there’s a different built-in incentive for accountability.
Linda Galindo: But I would push back very hard on you about healthcare struggling with this. They don’t struggle at all. They use it to the hilt to hide behind complexity that is not necessary at all.
Mark Graban: What do you mean by that? They hide behind it?
Linda Galindo: “Use a checklist or you are gone.” And in order to get around that: “Hey, patient, sign the spot yourself. You sign it.”
Mark Graban: Well, that’s what I mean by people going through the motions. They’ll say, “Well, we did the checklist.”
Linda Galindo: There are so many things in healthcare that are absolutely, ridiculously redundant, because you have prima donnas who say, “We’re not a team. You are all my necessary evil, so that I can be the exception.” On the most basic level, look at how many resources are spent checking on the check to check the checker for quality care. Give me a break.
The surgeons who know it’s a team — and they really are a team, and they interdepend — work out their relationships with people who are afraid of them or who won’t speak up. But it’s not “just so complex.” It’s high stakes for sure, but like you said with the airline, we have to trust that they’re interdepending. Just because the flight attendant isn’t a pilot doesn’t mean she can’t say, “Excuse me, there’s ice on that wing. Do you want to know about that?” Or, “Excuse me, you didn’t do the checklist. Do you want to know about that? This is the wrong side.”
A Friendly Disagreement: Can You Hold a Nurse Accountable for Speaking Up?
Mark Graban: Well, the flight attendant has the “I don’t want to die today” incentive that a nurse in an operating room doesn’t have.
Linda Galindo: I’m going to push back on you there too. They watch a human being who could be their mother. They don’t want that going on. Just because I’m not going to cut myself and bleed out in front of everybody doesn’t mean I don’t take ownership at that level.
Mark Graban: I think we’re having a friendly argument about it here. I’ll push back and say I think it’s unfair to tell the nurse, “You need to speak up,” because the surgeon might be a bully. The nurse might not get good assignments anymore if she speaks up and angers the surgeon. I think some nurses will speak up anyway, but a lot of them don’t, and I understand why. I don’t know how I could hold that nurse accountable for speaking up.
Linda Galindo: Okay. I don’t want to go into that health system.
Mark Graban: I mean, that’s most of them, I think.
Linda Galindo: Absolutely. Welcome to healthcare. You know what I’ve learned in these many years — maybe you have too? Stay healthy. You don’t want to go in there. Because there’s this whole, “Oh, it’s just so hard.” But what do they say? “We provide quality care, but we treat each other like this?” Absolutely ridiculous. The stress is so high.
Mark Graban: I agree.
Linda Galindo: Their commitment is definitely not to being accountable. Although I will say I have worked with healthcare organizations that I just love. I love them so much because the leader has this idea, knows it, and acts on those who are creating an environment where people will not call out errors.
And when you say, “Own and learn from mistakes,” they reward learning about the mistakes, so that every meeting starts with looking back: What did you learn?
Mark Graban: Mm-hmm.
Linda Galindo: Of course, when it’s a sentinel event — when someone is mortally wounded by a mistake — we have a process for that. But oftentimes we don’t have an accountability process for when something bad happens. In aviation, it’s anonymous. They just put it into one big feeder system, and no one knows who made the mistake or why, but there it is.
Mark Graban: Anonymous reporting. Yeah.
Linda Galindo: And you can report it. But in healthcare, you just have to hope that this nurse will say something. I mean, how do wrong-site surgeries happen? That’s ridiculous.
Leaders Must Invite People to Speak Up — and Reward It
Mark Graban: There are a lot of issues, and a lot of it probably stems from somebody in the room who knew or suspected there was a problem, and knew they’d get yelled at by a bully surgeon. So they say, “Well, I’m not really accountable for that. It’s on the surgeon,” and they keep quiet.
I had a guest recently, a retired airline pilot, Steve Montague. He talked about how before every single flight, he would tell his first officer, “I expect you to speak up.” That invitation was being made on a human level in a way that I would guarantee does not happen in most operating rooms. If the surgeon told people before the procedure, as part of the time out, “We are a team, and I’m human, and if you think I’m about to make a mistake, I expect you to speak up,” that’s different.
Linda Galindo: And that will get rewarded.
Mark Graban: Yes.
Linda Galindo: So that’s what you want to ask when you walk into any healthcare culture at the CEO level. What is the truth here? Not what do you hope is happening. What is the truth here? And then reward it. Otherwise, it’s, “It’s complex.” It’s not.
Mark Graban: The CEO might say, “Well, it’s policy that we do the time out.” That doesn’t mean they know people are doing the time out.
Linda Galindo: No, there has to be consequence upfront. “Let me tell you, this is a zero-error environment.” Why do payers refuse to pay for never events? Where did that come from? Because this should never happen.
Mark Graban: I call them so-called never events.
Linda Galindo: Yeah, never events. All that complexity and hiding behind it is baloney. So yes, in healthcare it is a daunting effort. However, I’m absolutely of the belief that when this is clear — and it has to be clear — we’re going to talk about it upfront. We’re not going to talk about chances. How many times do you want your paycheck to be wrong? How many times do you want the things that impact you directly to be wrong? You want them to never be wrong. So that’s the environment you’ll create: low stress, productivity, job satisfaction.
“We’re a team. When we go outside of this room, we have our roles. But when we’re together and interdependent, I want this environment. And hold me accountable. You hold me accountable.” Instead of it always being the leader.
Mark Graban: Yes. I agree.
Accountability Thieves: How the Unaccountable Run Our Lives
Mark Graban: Tell us about the new book, Accountability Thieves.
Linda Galindo: And the subtitle: How the Unaccountable Run Our Lives and What to Do About It. Everybody’s frustrated because the unaccountable are running our lives right now, in every way.
Mark Graban: In a lot of circles, yes.
Linda Galindo: What would you do if you knew that no matter what you did — ethical, unethical, moral, immoral, it didn’t matter — if it was a mistake that cost many millions of dollars but somebody profited from it, maybe you, you would be pardoned? Don’t worry about getting in legal trouble. You’re fine.
Mark Graban: Yeah.
Linda Galindo: How would your behavior change? Meanwhile, the message to everyone else is, “We want you to take risks, we want you to innovate, we want you to do these things. Oh, by the way, the punishment of accountability is going to be brutal on you, so make sure you do it right.” So: take risks, as long as you don’t take risks. That’s pretty much the message.
Mark Graban: Take risks, but it better be guaranteed to work. That’s not taking a risk.
Linda Galindo: Exactly. So Accountability Thieves opens our eyes in every major area of society to say, “This is what you’re hearing, but this is what accountability really is,” and lets you check the boxes. Education, healthcare, government — I forget all five — but there are five areas of our lives where you can go through a checklist and ask, “Before I choose this, is there accountability upfront? How can I put accountability upfront so I’m not always chasing accountability after the fact?”
Mark Graban: Yeah.
Linda Galindo: So before I check the box saying I’m subscribing to something, I ask: who’s accountable when I want to unsubscribe, and how does that work? I want to see that upfront. Or if I don’t like the number of one-off things I order every single day that a truck drops off, and I want to be accountable for being a good steward of the resources around me, how do I demonstrate that accountability upfront in my choices? The book covers all the ways society robs us.
The Most Insidious Thief: “It’s Easier to Do It Myself”
Linda Galindo: The people who are managing other people today — the ones with direct reports — are the most subtle and insidious accountability thieves. When they think about holding someone accountable, they go, “Yeah, it’s just easier to do it myself. I’ll just take care of it.”
Mark Graban: Instead of coaching or correcting or addressing the issue. I’d say that’s bad management.
Linda Galindo: Number one. But that’s the whole foundation of accountability. So if you have a kid in the workforce and their boss says, “Oh, I’ll just take care of it,” and then passes this person along and says, “Hey, we’ve got a great performer for you. You take them now”…
Mark Graban: That’s shortchanging them.
Linda Galindo: Right? It’s devolved to where rescuing, fixing, and saving gets rewarded. If you hold this person accountable, they say, “I don’t like my boss. I’m going to give him a bad rating.” And that boss wants to be liked more than they want to be effective. They want the next promotion.
That describes a lot of the people I work with. I say, “Help me understand: where is your accountability to the growth and development of your people?” And they say, “They’ll learn on the job.” No. You have to actually put the time in, and you should get rewarded for the growth and development of your people. If you make yourself not needed, you’re going to be the most valuable person there, because you’ll be dealing with what’s coming up, not just the stuff right in front of you.
The number one request I get is, “Could you teach us how to hold people accountable?” I’ll say, “Excuse me? If I put you in a room for an hour and said, ‘Think of ways to do this or you die,’ you’d think of stuff.” You’ve got to talk about why you don’t do it. That’s what you have to get to. Because it doesn’t get rewarded the way rescuing, fixing, and saving does. It doesn’t get rewarded the way building your people up to that 85% that’s theirs should be.
There’s 15% that lands on us. When I measure that 85%, it doesn’t go back down once people learn and have the education about accountability. Now you can predict they’ll take ownership of the thing that’s not going well, and they’ll be learning. They’ll have a reason and start learning, not an excuse and blame. It’s like clockwork. You can predict it.
I’d invest in a company where the leadership is measuring 85% or higher, because when I invest that money, I know it’s going to go into learning. When it’s less than that, the second you turn the screen on, you’re going to hear an excuse — a blame, not a reason and a learning. The assessment is incredibly accurate in that regard. I don’t want to put my money into something where you’ve spent your time figuring out why you’re not to blame. I want to know: yes, you used my money, you learned, and here’s where we’re going now. There’s very little of that.
“It All Begins and Ends With Me, But…”: Is That Accountability?
Mark Graban: Let me ask, as a final question as we wrap up — I’m going to play a game of “Is this accountability?” I’m going to repeat a bit of a speech that I’ve heard many, many times from a particular college football coach, and I’ll leave his name out of it. His post-game comments after a loss would go like this: “It all begins and ends with me, but the problem was that we didn’t execute today. The plan was good, and we just didn’t execute.”
To me, that sounds like trying to create the appearance of accountability, where a coach gives lip service to “I’m accountable for performance,” but the damn players just didn’t execute.
Linda Galindo: I don’t disagree with you. What would you say instead that would sound like accountability?
Mark Graban: “We lost today, and that’s on us as the coaches. We need to come in with a better game plan. We need to better prepare our players through practice next week so that we can come out and win the next game.”
Linda Galindo: Okay. Which one inspires the players?
Mark Graban: If I were a player and I heard my coach giving lip service to accountability but then saying, basically, in polite coach-speak, that the players didn’t perform, I don’t think that creates a good locker room environment. Some of the players might say, “Yeah, we need to perform better,” and other players might say, “No, Coach, you came in with a crappy game plan.” It seems like that would create dissent in a locker room.
A Four-Minute Reflection Exercise for Teams
Linda Galindo: This is what I would do in that situation: “Hey, let’s all reflect on what just happened. I want each of us to take four minutes and write the answers to these questions on a piece of paper. This is what I did. Here’s what I learned. Here’s what I’ll do differently next time. Here’s how I’m accountable.”
Four minutes, everybody’s done. “Okay, everybody look up. Now, one by one, everybody read yours. No comments, nothing.” What I did, what I learned, what I would do differently, how I am accountable. There — now you’ve got it.
The rest of this “we” stuff — “we,” not “me” — baloney. Individual and collective accountability at the same time is a winning team. And a team holds each other accountable. It doesn’t need a manager to do that.
Mark Graban: A high-performing team holds each other accountable.
Linda Galindo: Absolutely. And then I hear, “Oh, but we’re so risk-averse.” Okay, be risk-averse, average, and mediocre. I’m not giving you a dime.
Mark Graban: And you probably shouldn’t go get healthcare there if you can avoid it, if a hospital is talking that way.
Linda Galindo: You could drive a truck through people’s big lie about being accountable. And then it’s like, you know what? I don’t care if you change. Be unaccountable. It seems to be working, and it pays. That’s what’s happening, bottom line, in our society today. Not being accountable is getting rewarded more than being accountable. And as long as I agree to participate in that — which I don’t — that makes my life choices different.
I learned this incessantly, and it’s not something taught in college. It was a mistake at the time not to get my degree, but now I see that was my favorite mistake, because I can totally change the paradigm of accountability to being actually useful and not scary.
Closing
Mark Graban: That’s great. Linda Galindo has been our guest today. Thank you for sharing your favorite mistake story and for explaining so well why it was your favorite. I know you spent a lot of time thinking through all of that. And thank you for sharing your thoughts from your book. I’ll encourage people to go check out Linda’s website, lindagalindo.com. There will be links in the show notes. Again, the most recent book is Accountability Thieves. Please give me the subtitle, because I don’t have it right in front of me.
Linda Galindo: How the Unaccountable Run Our Lives and What to Do About It. And The Mistakes That Make Us is a must-read too, I have to say. All of us, whether or not you’re a guest on a podcast, need to go through this exercise. It’s absolutely amazing. So thank you very much for inviting me to be on your podcast.
Mark Graban: Thank you, Linda, for being here.