Interview with John G. Miller and Kristin Lindeen

Father-and-daughter team John G. Miller and Kristin Lindeen of the organizational firm QBQ Inc. discuss the importance of owning your thoughts, words, and actions.

What is QBQ, and how did it come about?

John: Five years after graduating from Cornell, I realized I wasn’t an eight-to-five office guy. A friend of mine suggested sales; soon after, I left my company and went off to sell training.

Within ten years, I had created the concept of QBQ, the Question Behind the Question. It was born out of experience: I had sat in leadership sessions, listening to management clients constantly say things like “Why can’t we find good people?” So I started speaking on personal accountability. People told me I couldn’t do that; it’s not a topic. They were right—it’s better than a topic. It’s everything.

Kristin, was personal accountability emphasized to you and your siblings growing up?

Kristin: Our parents raised us well. They didn’t use the phrase personal accountability all the time, but we knew that we couldn’t make excuses or blame others or circumstances. We had to own things, which was the underlying foundational theme in our household. Even as teens, we could see it made sense.

Interestingly, when I do talks, people will say they were raised the same way but never had a framework for it. So I think that QBQ has been transformative for them.

What does QBQ do?

John: At QBQ Incorporated, we do three things. First, we sell a lot of books; we have five in all. We also give a lot of talks, both virtually and in person—Kristin and I are our only speakers. Finally, we license QBQ training programs to companies.

With QBQ itself, the key is getting people to ask better questions. For example, instead of asking, “When is someone going to train me?” ask “What can I do to develop myself?” And instead of asking, “Why doesn’t my department do its job right?” ask “How can I make it better?”

This puts you on a path to personal accountability and helps eliminate three traps: blame, victim thinking, and procrastination. Don’t ask “Who?” questions because that leads to blame. Don’t rely on “Why?” questions because that leads to victim thinking. And a question like “When will they get back to me?” leads to procrastination. People often ask these questions without realizing it or understanding their impact.

Is it possible to take personal accountability too far?

John: It’s mostly about learning. You might beat yourself up over a mistake, but you should constructively ask what you can learn from it to move forward.

It’s also about boundaries. For example, one day I was riding down an elevator with a woman who was looking at the materials I’d left with her group. She asked, “So what you’re saying, John, is I should go back to the office and do people’s work for them?” I was flabbergasted. Accountability is not covering for people or doing their work—it’s about them taking control.

Which questions should be asked instead?

John: QBQ begins with “what” or “how” and contains the personal pronoun I. So ask things like “What can I do?” and “How can I make a difference?” The number one takeaway from QBQ is this: I can only change me. Managers eat this up because they want people to stop the infighting and finger-pointing inside their organization and work together instead.

Which of the three traps is the easiest to fall into, and which is the hardest to get out of?

Kristin: Good question. When I ask people this, they almost always say whining. But in one particular group, all but one person answered procrastination—so the group leader realized they had a big problem. People weren’t feeling like they were empowered, could make decisions, or could take action and therefore struggled with procrastination: getting stuck in that trap of “When is someone going to tell me what to do?”

Blame is so built into us that it becomes a defense mechanism, so I think it’s the hardest trap to break. If that’s the culture of a work environment, then it’s very difficult to chisel through. It only takes one individual to stop the cycle of blame, though.

John: I find the easiest one for people to admit to is procrastination. Everybody’s trying to manage their time, so it’s safe to admit to being a bad procrastinator. And I agree with Kristin that blame is probably the hardest to break because every day people have goals, but they’re seemingly thwarted by somebody else. So it’s easy to say, “If only management would do this” or “If only my colleagues would do that” or “If only the market would turn around.”

For example, I’ve got friends in real estate. They know how badly QBQ is needed in that field because there’s so much excuse making. Agents blame mortgage rates, the buyer, the seller, the broker, or the current market conditions. But there’s always an agent succeeding in every marketplace, and they’re not making excuses. They acknowledge that things have changed and put it upon themselves to adapt and do things differently.

Do leaders have more responsibility to apply personal accountability?

Kristin: In our QBQ books, we say that modeling is the most powerful teacher. When all eyes are on you, whether it’s five pairs of eyes in a home or five hundred pairs of eyes at a seminar, as the person in charge, you have the responsibility to make good on that statement. If you’re leading people, you need to be a person of integrity. You can say all the right things, but if you’re not doing them, people aren’t going to follow—they’re going to see that gap in your integrity.

John: Here’s a good example from a few years ago. This CEO has six hundred franchisees, and what do you think he hears from them every day? I got a bad location. You’re not doing enough advertising. Corporate is not giving me enough support. So he thought QBQ would be a good message for them. Well, about twenty minutes in, I could see a change on his face that said, Oh, he is not here to change only them. I need this too. We get a lot of that halfway through a session: the leader will start doing some serious self-reflection.

How does “going the extra mile” apply to QBQ?

John: If your organization wants an edge in its marketplace, then its individuals need to go the extra mile. Every single time somebody tells us a customer-service story that they’re excited about, it’s because somebody did. Period. In fact, chapter one of the QBQ! book is all about a server named Jacob getting me a Diet Coke—at a store around the corner—when his restaurant only sold Pepsi products. People love that story. It begins the book because he went above and beyond.

What do you think of the saying “We’re only human”?

Kristin: Dad, you told me this years ago—human nature is a baseline, not an excuse. That’s true; human nature is where we start as humans, but we have infinite potential to grow. Yes, I make mistakes. I’m not going to be perfect. But that’s no excuse to not grow. If I don’t, then that’s on me. Humans have amazing potential for growth.

John: That’s the sort of thing people will say when they don’t want to look in the mirror.

Do you believe there’s no I in team?

John: Organizations love to say this. There are actually a lot of I’s on every team. Those I’s are named Matt and Kristin and John, and when the I’s are empowered, the team can do great things. For people who believe there’s no I in team, the team becomes the excuse: things didn’t get done because of it. We have fun pushing back against that mindset.

Kristin: Teams are terrific, but they’re only as effective as the individuals are. So yes, there are many I’s in a team. Let’s go back to that example where almost everyone said they were procrastinators. It was because they were so team focused. We’ve got to take this to the team. We need to have ten team meetings about this project. The team must make a decision. They felt completely trapped and stymied. Instead of being told as individuals that they were doing a good job and were empowered, they couldn’t get anything done because they hadn’t been given clearance to make decisions outside the team.

John: What’s interesting is during our talk on personal accountability, we’ll ask the audience who’s the only person we can change. A third of them will say, “Me,” and the rest won’t answer, thinking it’s a trick question. After the talk, we’ll ask who in the audience was picturing people who weren’t there who needed the message. They’ll start laughing because they’ve sat there thinking of how their spouse, child, boss, or colleague would benefit from it. They then realize that they’ve been trying to fix others when they must work on themselves. 

Can personal accountability become a permanent mindset change?

Kristin: The thing with being “only human” is we must continually be intentional about growth because it is so easy to fall back into bad habits.

John: Here’s a great example of how to make it a permanent, positive change. There’s a guy in Ohio who, for the past seventeen years, has read the QBQ! book on New Year’s Eve. Every year, he messages me to say he saw something he hadn’t before. And that’s why the last page of the book says, “Repetition is the motor of learning.” Yes, we’re human. But we need to be intentional about continuing to learn, grow, and change, and that’s what he’s doing. And that’s what we all should be doing.

For more info, visit qbq.com

TAKE ACTION:
Determine how you can foster personal accountability for yourself and for your team.