How to make accountability work for you?
What does accountability in the workplace mean, and why is it essential to high performance? More importantly, how can you foster accountability, not only for yourself but for those people with whom you work?
When you give our full commitment and take full responsibility for your actions and results, you will feel inspired to go above and beyond to make your efforts count.
Accountability in the Workplace
High-performance teams and organizations empower employees to take ownership, foster a culture of accountability, and develop high levels of trust at all levels.
Being accountable is about taking the initiative and doing the right thing for your business. You take responsibility for results and do not assume someone else will do it. At a minimum, taking ownership means that if you recognize something is vital to achieving results, you take it upon yourself to bring it to the attention of the right people.
If ownership is about taking initiative, accountability is about follow-through and doing what you said you’d do. It’s recognizing that other team members are dependent on the results of your work. It’s about good, open, proactive communication to keep team members informed on the status of your commitments because the results of your work have a direct impact on their ability to follow through on their own commitments. Ultimately, when team members consistently demonstrate ownership and accountability, trust is formed.
In short, you show up for yourself and for others.
Without Accountability, Execution Suffers
When you don’t hold yourself accountable for getting work done well and on time, there’s a tendency to become even more lenient and forgiving of slippages. A day becomes a week, a week a month. If it happens once, it’s that little bit more acceptable for it to happen again. The impact is exponential. Your delay becomes your team’s delay. The work they had planned gets impacted and that work potentially has further downstream effects.
Similarly, lack of accountability can snowball in a team, department and organization. Tolerating missed deadlines, lack of punctuality and unfinished work has the tendency to make this behavior “no big deal.”
How to Create a Culture of Accountability
Here are some of the things leaders can do to help create a culture of accountability:
Make Accountability a Lived Value
Make accountability a part of your team’s normal way of operating. Talk about it, share ideas, come to a common consensus about what accountability means, and then use that as a foundation everyone works from as they make accountability an organizational culture.
Most importantly, make sure accountability is more than a stated characteristic of how your team operates. It needs to have consequences that are both positive and negative, and those consequences need to be consistently applied.
- Goals are at the Heart of Accountability
An important step here is to break things down into meaningful goals and measurable metrics for everyone. Without proper goals, it’s going to be nearly impossible to effectively enforce accountability.
Goals provide clear expectations for everyone. Make goals specific and measurable. Within a team environment, this is especially important because of the level of inter-dependency and the exponential impact of not meeting expectations.
Another important outcome of having goals is defining what is NOT a priority. One of the biggest reasons you fail to live up to your commitments is because you put too much on your plate and become de-focused on key priorities.
- Make Accountability Everyone’s Responsibility
Ownership is about taking responsibility and taking initiative whether or not the responsibility is clearly yours. There’s a tendency in group settings for the diffusion of responsibility whereby a person is less likely to take responsibility for action or inaction when others are present.
In the context of accountability, this may mean you don’t see yourself as responsible for holding others accountable for the timeliness, quality and strong communication. Perhaps it isn’t your responsibility – there’s someone more senior in the meeting or team, but this is where taking ownership becomes important.
- Build Trust Through Support and Encouragement
Trust is an important factor that contributes to accountability. In low-trust environments, people are quick to focus on blame, and not on finding a solution. In high trust environments, people focus on the solution, and not blame. The blame game needs to end at all levels.
A key reason people avoid accountability is as a self-defense mechanism because they’re worried about what might happen if things go wrong. A person with low self-confidence — and possibly bad past experiences — will fear accountability. They may be afraid of messing things up and the imagined consequences, while a person who is naturally more confident knows they can get up and try again if things go wrong. So, give praise where praise is due, to build confidence in your staff, so people aren’t afraid to take the initiative.
One thing you can do to help individuals that resist accountability is to help them understand the difference between accountability and making a judgment about how well they’re doing their job. Failure to meet an objective is OK if the individual let the team know with as much notice as possible, why it happened, how they intend to correct it and to ask for help if it’s needed. Approaching failure in this way demonstrates accountability. There’s an opportunity to learn from it and seek coaching or support to ensure future success. In this case, the individual is doing their job well. It’s OK to fail from time to time. You just need to be upfront and proactive in your communication.
Creating accountable employees delivers numerous business benefits: better execution, lower employee turnover and more creativity and innovation. Overall, shifting to constructive accountability may require a culture change within your team or organization. Leaders, managers and employees will find the results well worth the effort.
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