Episode 319: Accountability Without Drama

Welcome back to the Scale Your Insurance Agency Podcast, the show built for independent agency owners who are done being the bottleneck in their own business. I'm Daniel Metcalf, and every week I'm joined by my co-host, Mike Stromso, one of the most respected operators in the independent agency world. Between the two of us, we bring you the real levers that move a $3 to $20 million agency from successful but maxed out to systemized, scalable, and running without you holding it all together. Here's what we focus on. Mike brings the people side, leadership, team development, niche sales mastery, and a three-piece system that helps agencies build a business worth owning. I bring the machine side. AI, automation, and workflow design that frees your team from the operational drag, eating your margin, and your time. Together, we're building a framework that can grow an independent agency 4X to 9X without burning out your people or your checkbook. If you're an agency owner who's tired of growing by herring, who knows you have a capacity sitting on the table but can't figure out how to unlock it, this is the show for you and your weekly edge. All right, new week, new topic. There has been some significant gains with a lot of our uh friends in the independent insurance agency space that both Mike and myself work with, and it's really been around accountability. So today's topic is accountability without the drama, how to stop nice from being expensive. Mike, this is right up you and your team's alley. This has been a long conversation with many different agency owners in the last couple of weeks, specifically this prior week. I cannot wait to dive into the subject because of what we have started to see around accountability, where if there's includes drama, there's missed commitments, vague expectations, under performance, tolerated for way too long, and it just slows down our process and trying to help them scale. So I cannot wait to talk about accountability and how we can start to add accountability to agencies that want to scale.

Well, you know, the question is thank you, Daniel. Um, you don't even know this. Right before we jumped on to this podcast, I got a text from an agency owner that's in crisis mode again.

Oh no, another crisis.

Uh aka, I'm sure there's a lot of drama involved as well. Yep. So in listening to what you just said, Daniel, are and is the agency owners or owner willing to receive the feedback, aka the accountability, because accountability breeds responsibility, and not take it as criticism, but take it as constructive feedback to help them improve. Because when they won't receive it and actually do something with it, aka take action, then it's going to become very, very expensive. And back to the old adage nice people finish where, Daniel? I heard last. Yeah, I heard the same thing from my parents and my grandparents, and and probably prior to that. So, I mean, let's face it, there's two kinds of relationships in the world, right? Personal relationships and business relationships. And I hope and pray that people don't have drama in their family, too, and it's real, and it probably is there from time to time. But in business, you're there for a purpose. You know, our business purpose is to impact people's lives personally and professionally, and that's at the core of what we do, right? And to help their business. So accountability does breed responsibility. So clear response, clear expectations, right? You want you want to dive into the first. What do you have? You have some questions.

Well, let's talk, you know, but what we really want to cover today is how to install accountability that doesn't wreck the culture, right? We know that culture eats strategy for lunch every single day. And so we, but in order for you to scale, accountability has to be installed. So our whole episode today is going to be talking about how to install accountability that doesn't wreck the culture. And the first place that accountability needs to show up is when there is vague expectations, right? Like, how can you create accountability and maintain your culture if you have vague expectations and that we're like family mentality?

I'm gonna reverse engineer this one. Oh, sure. Uh I was uh at a learning event a lot of years ago, very high-level learning event, and this warlike family came up, and that day, boom, like a two by four, because we didn't have the proper accountability in my own independent insurance agency, and there's this warlike family mentality going on. So I got to go back to the agency and from a leadership perspective, update the culture so that it was a business, not a family. Because I mean, think about this. Can you ever truly fire a family member, Daniel?

Even if we want to?

Even if we want to, yeah.

No, no, you cannot.

So that's when I started saying team. Team, my teammates, my teammates, my teammates, and and I made sure that this was ingrained. And there was one person who wouldn't let it go. And so then I got to have a side conversation with that gal, and I explained to her, and she was very coachable, and she got it. She goes, I get it. You know, that's that's who I was uh growing up, but times have changed. I will change my wording for the benefit of the organization, right? So you can't scale complexity, you can only scale simplicity, number one. But one of the things that we teach uh in goal setting and expectations is clear expectations. Okay. So, and we talk about this with our, you know, I was just talking with our director of AFY this morning, who will be coming on a future episode of the podcast to talk uh in a deeper way about accountability because it's so vitally important. I mean, let's face it. Daniel, do you like accountability?

Actually, I do.

Okay, so you're one of those rare sick individuals. Right.

Yep, yep.

I like it. I know a few people that they they crave it. Right. I mean, it doesn't bother me anymore because I've been practicing it for so long, it's become habitual. I have accountability every Friday morning and more often sometimes. And it's important, it's vitally, vitally important. But, you know, clarity, because I was talking with our director of AFY, Joe McKinley, he said, we said it again this morning. You know, when somebody's confused, what happens? He said nothing. A confused person won't act. So if a if a person or a team has vague expectations or vague direction, there's a good chance that they might act on part of it, but they're certainly not going to act on all of it. And they don't have any clarity. And so they can't get to what done looks like, or get accomplishing or finishing a strategy or an objective or a project or reach a goal. So critically, critically important. And, you know, I'm well, I'm gonna, I know we're gonna get to this a little bit, so I'll pause for there for what I was gonna say next, but super, super important that you have clear expectations, clearly defined goals, that people know what done looks like. And most importantly, you've got to have a deadline. You've got to have a finish line. Otherwise, it just becomes a dream.

Let's talk a little bit about accountability as a system, right? And what you've what what UPP has been um really a big admit of, especially with their agencies, is this accountability as a system, right? Uh vision organizer, setting up roles, having scorecards, having weekly commitments. Tell us a little bit about how that works and how you've built that accountability as a system.

100%. Um, we just had this yesterday uh with an agency that we work with. Um the task of the owner who is in bottleneck mode, right? They're stuck. Uh, it was learned by one of our teammates that things were going on that we weren't aware of, and it needed to be repaired or updated before we can move forward. Okay. There was no clarity of role at the top. Yes, they had followed what we teach, and they had job or role descriptions for every team member. Uh, they had been trained on it, they were in agreement, they were following the plan, but we one key component was missed. They didn't have that clear role at the top. So, you know, culture and everything that happens culturally, right person, right seat, right? Not right person, wrong seat, or wrong person, wrong seat, right person, right seat in a role with a clearly defined plan that's operating in synchronicity with the rest of the team, like a you know, well-oiled machine. And then the goal is to make sure that while everybody is moving forward in their roles and they know what they're doing, and most importantly, here's another thing people sometimes miss the why, and sometimes it's really, really important to help your team understand in their roles why they're doing what they're doing. Okay, it's a certain type of protection, or it's a certain type of risk management, or uh another strategy, and well, just tell them to do it. Well, sometimes you need to under help them understand why they're doing it in the first place. Super, super important. So, and then you know, let's take a sports analogy, Daniel. Do they have scoreboards in curling? They do.

Okay, good, we have lots of scoreboards.

Yeah, scoreboard, score cards, well, I mean, most sports do, and and I know you're a curling guy, so anyway, yeah, scoreboard, right? So if you didn't have a scoreboard when you're doing curling, right? It just become an exercise routine, right?

Right. Some would say not that heavy of exercise, but they've never slept before.

Yeah.

That's our opinion. So anyway, any sport for that fact, there's a scoreboard. And why do they have that? Because it defines who's winning and who's losing, right? And so it's the same mentality on a business team. We installed scoreboards for every position on the team. Now, the sales scoreboard looks different than the service scoreboard or scorecard, but it was intentional. Back to intentionality, vitally, vital important as well. It was intentional based on our desired outcome or goal. And it had to be in alignment. And nowadays, that's where you what you guys do is so powerful. So you bring AI automation and technology to the game that helps speed up the identification of what the score is, aka a dashboard, right? You put it up there for you know leadership and ownership to see. Hey, that's the score, guys. We're either winning or we're losing. Okay. And then as far as the human side of it, because when technology does the work of machines, the dashboard, people finally get to do the work of humans. Okay. The human side of it and the weekly commitments, we installed a system within our agency, okay, and we'll talk that talk about that more uh in a minute, but a system to do a weekly and a monthly check-in with our team members about how they are doing, not only in their role, but on their commitments to the agency to keep the agency healthy. So that's another executive coaching strategy that we talk about a lot is the goal is to keep the agency healthy because we're all stewards to the agency, to the health of the agency. If the agency is not healthy, it cannot, it doesn't have the infrastructure or the revenue to grow. I mean, part of agency health is money, yes, but another part of agency health is culture, another part of agency health is its pipeline and it's KPIs and all of that.

So yeah, and that's where what's what's wonderful today when we're working with agencies with where technology is at. So many times when we ask them, well, what's the scorecard, or how you know what we're where are they at from their from their scorecards? Well, it's so difficult to build the scorecards out. You know, I don't, I'm not a data analyst, or I'm not really good at spreadsheets or right uh all these kinds of things. Now, these wonderful tools allow us to build the scorecards based on getting access to the data, obviously, is is the key to this, but we can create those scorecards now. We can create agency scorecards, leadership scorecards, individual scorecards, and we can help then, even with these tools, now scrape a lot of the information that sits in CRM, scrape information that sits in um AMS systems and whatnot, and be able to analyze the score, you know, the work towards the scorecard, or give us suggestions, or where are the lowest hanging fruit, like we no longer have to do data gymnastics in order to get real information to hold people accountable. Um, I give you the example that we see that we saw before, where if it wasn't for the agency being so diligent around having these gates that goes within their sales pipeline, if they wouldn't have been so diligent about having those gates and having the right gates, and then being able to point back to, okay, each one of the leads, how did they do going through these gates to find out that you know why people weren't hitting their scorecards, number one. And number two, it helped identify places that we could coach up and and scale up in certain areas to help them hit their goals, right? So it's not always about a punishment for scorecards or some type of, you know, from that stack. It's also a positivity so that we don't have to do mental gymnastics to figure out where we're at all the time. We can actually see something quickly, correct it, or or even amplify it. Like that was my favorite part, you know, recently when we're working with that producer, we're like, wow, look, this is working really, really well. Let's invest in this, right? Let's invest in this area. Let's let's give you more. You can, you know, let's let's take this to the next level and then find the next person. Let's train them on how to do it. And now we can scale easily by doing something that was already there that we could measure rather than relying on you know something happening in the past over and over. Oh, oh, seeing a pattern from three, six, nine months ago. We could see it in real time. And that that's the difference between a scaling agency and one that's lagging behind.

100% agree. And that's part of that is the why. Why is this important to not only you, but the organization? Because the healthier the healthier the organization is, the more it can give, and the more we can scale and grow together. So great, great stuff. So all right.

So, and okay, speaking of growth and growing together, let's now talk about the difference between coaching, managing, and correcting.

Let me throw it back to you in the form of a question, Daniel.

Okay.

Do you like to be managed?

No.

Okay. I didn't know what you're gonna say based on the fact that anyway. There is one person, and I don't remember how long ago it was, that did say yes, I like to be managed, but I think it's the only person, uh, and I've been asking that question for a lot of years, uh, everybody says no, I don't like to be managed. Who likes to be managed? I mean, that's why we're entrepreneurs, right? Right, correct. Yep. That's why we started our own businesses because we don't want to be managed. We want to do what we do, right? But people do, and they're silently waiting to be led. And if you've got teammates on your team, well done. Hopefully, they're all the right teammates that you would rehire again if you're starting all over again tomorrow and you had the money to hire people. Okay. But they're with you for a reason because they don't really need you. They can go out and hire and start their own business tomorrow, but they don't want to. They want to be part of a team. Great. That's fantastic. They're silently waiting to be led. And if they're A players, they want to be shown a path. And they want to be shown the right path, and they want to be coached, and they want to grow, and they want a scoreboard by which, you know, they can they can identify that they are growing and that's they're winning the game. Um, and they want to work with a group of special people, and they want a chance to become part of something significant. I mean, these are all things that the best of the best want or the A players want, right? So they want to be coached, they want to be led, and they want to be held accountable or corrected when need be, and they don't take it as criticism. It's like, well, gee, thanks for letting me know that, Daniel. I didn't see that. It's a bit of a blind spot. I'm glad we were over to overcome that together. It's that kind of perspective, that kind of outlook. And that's this really goes back to, Daniel, the attracting, recruiting, interviewing, and hiring phase. Because if you do the right work there, then you have these kind of people within your organization who accept you know, that kind of coaching and that kind of leadership to continue to better the organization. They don't see it as criticism, they see it as a chance to get better and to improve. And and people in that realm, they want to develop, they want to get better. We want to learn.

But what happens when you have a top producer who doesn't want to be coached or led?

Uh the word toxic comes to mind. And it really infects the rest of the culture.

So are you saying that if you allow the toxicity to continue, you'll actually get less results overall than what that top producer can do because that will degrad the toxicity will create degradation amongst the rest of the team that will outweigh what the top producer is bringing in.

Yes, and the standards that you've set operationally for the agency are now cloudy. Well, the standards are this. Our core values are these, but I'm not seeing it over there. I'm confused. Which is it?

So then on that remain, how do you begin to set consequences with all threats or any type of fear-based leadership?

It's it's really one-on-one work with that individual to help them understand that there is no IN team, that this is about the team, there is no one person bigger than the team, and it's all about team play. Okay, we have standards, uh, we have protocol, we have roles. We we have the agreement that we put in place for this particular year that you agreed to operate under, and that's back to uh you know the positioning of the role. We I recommend that you meet with every one of you. Let's take the producer as an example, right? There should be a planning document that is put in place for every year that outlines you know what they plan to accomplish for that particular year. And they've agreed to it. Some cases they sign off on it with a date. And really, that's what you go back and say, Hey, look, do you remember working on this together? And we put this in place? You know, this is who we are. These are our core values. This is what our you know dictates our culture. And we're to adhere to that together.

Right.

In many instances, by putting the accountability back on the individual, right? Help having um teaching them how to hold themselves accountable, coaching them on how to hold themselves accountable, you no longer have to set consequences with threats or fear-based, because then the garden weeds itself, right? So it the and so whether it's the other teammates or it's the other, right? It's the it's their own internal clock, whatever it might look like, they'll either set their own consequences, right? And not put it back on leadership as a fee, you know, it's fear-mongering or any types of threats, right? It's going to be more of like, hey, if you want to be on the island, you have to be part of the island, right? And so, and you agreed to be on the island doing this work, so and we expect you to hold yourself accountable to that. We'll provide tools and resources, but this is this is what we all agree to. And then you can use that agreement as a way to as the consequences, right? You broke that agreement. What are we gonna do about it, right? What are we gonna do about it? What are you gonna do about it? Yeah, yeah.

Let me pig back one more thing onto that. Yeah. And and we talk about this as well, but the question is the answer. And so in my own agency, I remember uh when I learned to do this in in even even better way, so somebody would need to experience uh some accountability, and so I would bring them into a conversation, and I would have a few good questions planned to ask them about their situation, and then I bring them to a point and I would say, Hey, Daniel, so you know, we expect every person who's a producer to do this, this, and this, but you're not doing this, and you just told me that you're not going to do it. Okay. So, from an ownership leadership standpoint, let's switch chairs. Okay, Daniel, you come sit here, you're the owner leader, and I'm gonna move to your chair. Okay? So, Daniel, I'm telling you I refuse to do that. What do you think I should do, Daniel? So, what I just did is I pushed it back to their side of the table and they're required to answer me. Right. And in a lot of cases, they'll say, Well, I wouldn't put up with it. I said, So then what is our next move?

Right. And the word hour. What is our next move?

They say it it becomes the truth.

Exactly.

Yep.

So that's one of my favorite strategies of all time from a leadership.

That's a great one. That that one I hope people uh snip that one and take that one today. All right, so to kind of wrap this all up together, let's talk about how to make accountability normal, not confrontational, because we use cadences to make it accountable. So I always think the same thing. Like, if I ever want to start a new habit or if I ever want to start a positive um uh positive routine, it always comes down to the cadence, right? The perfect morning, the um uh alarms on my phone going off three times a day, like making it just part of the routine. How do we how do we create a routine around accountability?

Well, I think it really goes back to commitment, number one. You know, commitment is the thing you said you were gonna do long after the mood you set it in has passed. And I learned that a lot of years ago, and it became the crux of my own journey in accountability. I'm on my 14th year with an accountability partner that I meet with every Friday morning at 6 a.m. And yes, I know that, and yes, I know that. And we haven't missed in over two years. We found we found a way to be accountable even if we're both on other sides of the world. And just to share it here, we are responsible for sending each other a video, giving our you know, 10 to 15 minute accountability report for the week, even though we're not on, right? We send the video and that's our accountability for the week. So, and we will, you know, if we can't make it at six because of airplanes or whatever, that's fine. We'll get it done maybe over the weekend, but it we don't miss. So, bottom line is what that has done, that cadence, like you said, Daniel, that cadence of accountability, and so I took all of this and built it into the agency, and I'll get that in just a minute. So that cadence of accountability has become so habitual, it's become part of my subconscious, and therefore I think about it all the time. And so, you know, case in point, like last Friday, I said, I will do this, I will do this, I will do this, and I'm being count held accountable. And what we do in our accountability sessions is we rate our week based on our weekly rhythm register and the goals that we set and our execution thereof, right? So we rate it in two different ways. We rate the week overall, it's got a number from zero to ten. And by the way, neither of us ever give it, I don't think we've ever given ourselves a 10. Okay? That's just who we are. Our expectation bars for ourselves is way up here, and it's never good enough. That's not everybody. I realize that. Okay. And then we have a weekly rhythm register uh execution as well. And sometimes they're the same, but most of the time they're different. So, what I did is I took that same thought process in the agency business that I learned personally, I should say, in my own personal and business world, and converted it to the agency business. And so that's where, and it wasn't always called this, but today it's called PX3, which is the accountability solution for team members in agencies. And this is generally the service team. The sales team has a different document called the Sales Growth Accelerator, but these are both accountability documents uh for their roles and for their positions in the agency. And it includes a cadence and a rhythm of check-ins. Okay. Sales, it's generally weekly. For the service team, it's monthly with uh, you know, weekly huddles on initiatives to keep the momentum going forward. So uh it's just built into the culture, it's built into who we are. Uh, you know, we still have, from a leadership perspective, today, same page meetings. I happen to know it's on the third Monday of every month at 2 45 p.m. Pacific. Yes, I know that. It's the cadence, it's the cadence of accountability. I know it's coming. And now what we've built in because we are in the mode of scaling, not growing, which is a very different type of environment. We now have standing accountability sessions in our business to scale every Friday morning at 8 o'clock Pacific. Why? Because it's the cadence that needs to happen to continually make things happen. We're not coming to the meeting, and in our sessions, uh, our scaling sessions every Friday morning right now. I think there's eight questions that we answer on each side every Friday morning about what happened. And we're asked to, out of those eight questions, six of them have a rating from one to ten. And we're asked to rate ourselves, and we do. Okay. And it's within a system, and then we submit it within the system, and it goes right up uh to a greater pond, uh, which creates greater accountability people that we work with. So the best and the best businesses, and the best and the best business people and personal people, they embrace accountability, they want it, they put themselves in a position to have a cadence so that it happens automatically, not on a hope basis. Sure. Because hope is not a what?

Strategy.

Right. Hope is not a strategy, right? They don't hope it's gonna happen. They make it happen through that intentionality uh and accountability because accountability breeds responsibility. So I hope that brought you everything. I want to add on one more thing. Uh, one of our new teammates, um, been on the team now for a couple of months. One of the greatest things he has brought to the table, uh, Daniel, as you know, is he's a big deadline guy. I mean, big, big, big. We were talking about this recently. And so it was in Orlando, and uh he has shared his deadline philosophy with all the agents that we work with, and they've embraced it. I love that, right? And so we were at uh a mastermind event with uh our high-performing agents recently, and he was telling a story about one of his kids. He's got three kids, they're all adult children now, uh, and the youngest one's his son, and he he's built the deadlines and the accountability into his family, right? And his son called him one day and said, Hey dad, I got a question. It's an engine-related question uh on a vehicle, and dad, I just want some advice. I don't want a deadline. Can I just ask me a question? The son said that because the dad has it's become a cadence in their household deadline, deadline accountability, right? But I will suggest that his I know his kids are all successful in their own right based on where they are in life, because accountability and consistency and all of that are so by and commitment are so vitally important.

Okay.

Well, and the reaction to our our our topic today, sorry to interrupt. When you have that kind of environment, it kind of self-eliminates drama. Which is one is a wonderful, wonderful place to be.

Right, because it goes back to expectations, right? So usually where drama finds itself is if there's some type of change in expectations or lack thereof, and that's where the drama comes out. So if you create that cadence of accountability, like you said, and you know what's coming at these times and this process and what it looks like, and you know what's what's expected of you at what time, it just becomes part of the normal procedure. And that that is then where there's no place for drama because it's all been agreed upon, you know what's coming. It wasn't like it was some surprises, and it's ready to go. So that's exactly the type of cadence that you need to create if you want to create accountability without the drama. 100%. Try to wrap it up.

If you really want to scale, there's no place for it.

Right. All right. So that is a wrap on this week's episode of Scale Your Insurance Agency Podcast. Hey, if you found anything here that you feel would be extremely helpful for someone else within your within your network, any other agency owner who needs to hear it, please share it, subscribe, download, uh, review us on all your favorite podcast tools. Um, because our community can only grow when other good operators help each other level up. So we'd really appreciate that. And if you ever want to try to figure out any of this and not have to do it alone, Mike and I are always willing to field any type of questions that you might have. Find us on LinkedIn, find us on the socials, and on your on our website, and we will answer any question that you have and help you find exactly where your biggest lever is towards scaling. But until next week, build the system, protect your time, and scale the right way. We'll see you next week.