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Your purchasing team isn’t securing materials. The performance of your engineering team is inconsistent. Overall productivity is lacking.
Sound familiar? If you’re in a leadership role, chances are you have an accountability problem.
“I’ve yet to meet a leader who didn’t have an issue with accountability in their organization,” said Mark Green, a leadership and business growth coach who literally wrote the book on creating a culture of accountability. “It’s a universal problem that leads to numerous other issues if it remains unresolved.”
Green works with CEOs across multiple industries to close accountability gaps within their organizations. “Many of the issues they view as problems are actually symptoms of an underlying accountability problem,” Green said. “It’s frustrating. More importantly, it’s costly to their business.”
The best strategies and market opportunities mean nothing if you cannot effectively leverage your people to execute your plan, according to Green. To implement a structure that improves performance, he suggested building an accountability framework on three foundational elements.
Role Accountability
The practical definition of accountability is found in its root: account. “It’s about tracking something other than accomplishment,” Green said. “You need to separate accountability for a thing from the doing of the thing.”
Ask your team members to write down what the company expects them to do. How do they justify their salary? They’ll likely note a series of bullet points from their job descriptions instead of specific outcomes they should be achieving.
Every person in your organization must understand what they are paid to produce in their positions. Focus on the nouns of results instead of the verbs of the tasks needed to achieve them. “Your team isn’t managing accounts and balancing resources,” Green said. “They’re increasing customer satisfaction and maximizing gross profits.”
Create clarity around role accountability because the average employee in most organizations doesn’t fully understand what they’re being paid to produce, Green said.
“Every team member should understand their responsibilities to raise the level of accountability throughout the organization,” he added. “It increases their focus on what matters most.”
Establishing role accountability is an enlightening — and often challenging — process. Your team might feel like the exercise is a cold and grating analysis. It’s still necessary to do.
“Some employees mistakenly think they’re being asked to justify their job when asked about their role in the company,” Green said. “It’s a clarifying question designed to have them view their responsibilities through the correct lens.”
Process Accountability
This important element involves baking accountable behaviors into your organization. Single-point accountability — making one person responsible for ensuring a task gets done — is key.
Determine who will be accountable for monitoring the progress of each priority. Contribution isn’t always tied to accountability, according to Green.
“The person assigned to complete a project isn’t necessarily the one who should be accountable for making sure it gets done,” he said.
Most leaders tap the team member with the most relevant experience, although that might not be the best approach. “Someone completely unrelated to the project might have the skills and mindset to ensure the team remains on track,” Green said. “That scenario can work as long as the domain expert is part of the project’s workflow.”
Is the team on track and progressing toward its goal? If they’re not, what needs to be done to refocus their efforts? Who needs to be pulled into the conversation to help reset the timeline?
“That’s accountable behavior in action,” Green said.
Delegating responsibilities properly is also a key part of process accountability. Delegation requires you to communicate clear expectations about tasks and let employees know you believe in their abilities to get them done.
Provide context in terms of why they’re being asked to take on assignments, including why the projects matter to the company, the team and you as a leader.
Finally, let employees know that you’ll be monitoring their progress.
Don’t let a project stray too far, of course. “Take action as soon as you see the slightest indication of drift to avoid having to make large adjustments that require multiple resources,” Green said.
Leading by Example
A culture of accountability always starts at the top. Are you walking your talk every day? Are you holding yourself accountable to the same standards you ask your team to follow? There’s a tougher question to answer: What behaviors has your team seen you tolerate that are inconsistent with your demands?
When one employee is regularly late to meetings without reproach, your punctual team members will notice. You’ll lose credibility in their minds. Be consistent with your expectations and how you enforce them.
As a leader, you get paid to ensure that your team delivers results. You’re responsible for making sure your group produces consistently over time. If you’re tolerating under-performers or employees who don’t fit their roles, you are the accountability problem.
It’s far easier to establish accountable behaviors in a small or mid-sized company, where there’s less inertia to overcome. Doing so is critical if you want to scale operations. Having the right accountability framework in place will reduce friction among your team when your business grows and workplace complexities increase.
Creating a culture of accountability ultimately demands holding team members to high expectations, course correcting, coaching and ensuring that the right people are in the right roles. Doing so improves collaboration and success in the workplace.
It also makes your job a heck of a lot easier.
“Accountability is like blood pressure medication for leaders,” Green said. “Baking it into their organizations helps them sleep at night.”
