Demand Accountability - Push for Better Results in your OMC.

Budget deficits if managed properly and kept at moderate levels don’t kill countries. However, accountability deficits behave differently and have the potential to collapse any company including your oil marketing company (OMC). In this article we look at three ways through which lack of accountability is affecting your OMC negatively and share three ways to attack and reduce the accountability deficit problem.

FEBRUARY 2014 • Tsuwa Thompson

Picture Credit: ChristianPost.com

In This Article

• Introduction
• Demand Accountability - Push for Better Results in your OMC.
• About the Author

What do I mean when I use the phrase 'accountability deficits'? Accountability deficits exist when your oil marketing company or any other company has “A performance situation where the human efforts and resources deployed to achieve a organisation’s vision including sustainable profitability outweigh the end results and value an organisation enjoys”, Tsuwa Thompson.

The top three ways your OMC may be suffering from accountability deficits are:.

1. Sales people who sell for the sake of volume and ignore their responsibility of vetting the customer's creditworthiness. The end result is simple - delayed payments and/or bad debts which affect your OMC’s cash flow and shareholder profitability. Start holding people accountable for getting money into the bank not just volumes out of the depot.
   
   
2. Officers who handle new station projects without applying proper project management ethics. Such officers give excuses for delays and block achievement of new revenue streams. Stop putting out fires; deal with the fire starters. If you want speedy projects, improved sales performance and faster profitability hold people accountable.
   
   
3. Staff whose anthem is made up of five words; "it is not my job". When customers demand for service they sing the anthem. When colleagues ask for support they shout the anthem. When managers ask what happened they point fingers at others and say, "It is not my job". These members of staff reduce company productivity, mess up customer service, and generally impact performance negatively. They won't stop till you start to hold them accountable in a way that they can't say, "It is not my job".

Here are three ways to reduce these accountability deficits:

1. Set individual targets for all staff even the front desk officer and execute quarterly performance reviews demanding to know what they have achieved.
   
   
2. Demand that your managers actually supervise their teams as opposed to covering up their accountability deficits. Ensure they supervise their teams using the same targets and company procedures.
   
   
3. Cultivate a culture of accountability in the workplace by educating your team on the importance of embracing accountability. First run an accountability assessment and run tailored training for your staff to address the accountability deficits and boost compliance. Once they know, you can demand it from them.
   

2014 isn't a year for excuses or empty stories. What you need is a performance driven culture that gives results that lead to sustainable profitability which take you a step closer to the vision mapped out for your OMC. What you need is a culture of accountability.

Tsuwa Thompson is the Chief Executive Officer of RtHE Consult Limited.

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