Accountability is a funny thing.
If you don’t have it embedded into the culture of your team, it makes pretty much everything that you do a lot harder.
But most people don’t really understand what it is, let alone know how to embed it into the culture of their team.
We struggle because it’s kind of intangible as a concept. You can’t just tell someone to be more accountable and then they add it to their todo list.
It’s essentially an attitude, an approach to how we work. Meaning that you don’t just do it.
It’s also tightly connected to trust, something else that is intangible, hard to just do and takes time to build.
We can actually use this connection to trust to accurately define what accountability actually is. Accountability comes down to the answer to this question:
“Can I trust you to do the thing that you said you would?”
If someone can honestly answer yes to this question, then they are willing to be accountable for their responsibilities and actions.
Still, how do we actually drive trust and therefore, accountability?
Today, we’re going to make accountability far more concrete and actionable so that you can actually use it within your team to get the best out of them (and yourself).
A process for driving accountability into the culture of your team
So, we know that accountability is a little bit messy and hard to implement, due to its nature, but you can take some pretty concrete steps towards making it part of the culture of your team. Let’s go through them.
Set clear and concrete expectations
Your team can’t take accountability when they don’t know what they’re accountable for. Whether it’s their individual role, or a project that someone is working on, you need to set expectations so that someone knows what success looks like. Once they know this, they know what they need to do – and the opportunity to do it.
Track expectations and goals
There is no point telling your team what success looks like if you don’t track whether you’re then successful or not. It may sound obvious, but too many managers lose sight of goals that they’ve set, especially when they may need to have an awkward conversation about their team missing them.
For individuals, you can do this via their personal development plans and regular one-on-one meetings.
For a team, this may be regular team meetings or project review meetings where you review where you’re at in terms of delivery and timelines.
Set standards for behaviours
You also need to hold your team accountable for how they behave, not just for their job roles and projects. Standards for behaviours may include things like:
- Internal and external communication.
- How meetings and calls are run.
- Giving and receiving feedback.
Whatever behaviours that you value and set standards for, you need to be clear about them so that you can hold your team (and yourself) accountable.
Be a leader who leads by example
You can’t hold others accountable if you’re not holding yourself accountable. Put simply, you set the bar for standards and behaviours in your team. Whatever you do, your team will follow and trust me – they see and hear everything.
So, take a look at some of the examples I shared in this LinkedIn post for the kinds of things that you can do to set the right example.
Give consistent feedback on expectations and behaviours
An important aspect of accountability is telling someone if they need to improve and if necessary, to enforce consequences if standards are not being met.
The place to start here is with learning how to give feedback to someone which is a basic skill that all managers need to master. If someone isn’t getting tasks completed or their behaviour is not meeting with your expectations, then they need to know this and it may be something that you speak to them about during their review meetings.
Related: here are a couple more examples of accountability being missed and how to avoid these situations.
Tactics for embedding accountability into your team
Finally, let’s talk about some very specific tactics that can help you embed accountability into your team. At first glance, these tactics aren’t directly applicable to accountability, but they all come back to the core thing that we’re trying to achieve – building trust and your team doing what they said they would, every time.
Start all meetings on time
Simple. If you’re going to dedicate time to holding a meeting, then you respect each other’s time by showing up on time. Here, you’re holding people accountable to each other to respect their time.
All meetings have agendas, note takers and actions
Remember how you can’t really hold people accountable if they don’t know what they’re being held accountable for? Meetings are a breeding ground for forgotten ideas and missed actions simply because most people don’t have agendas, take notes or assign actions. If you do these things for every single meeting that your team has, accountability will quickly build and become the norm.
Also make sure that all notes and actions are shared via email with all attendees afterwards – again making sure that everyone knows what they’re responsible for.
Start all recurring meetings with actions from the last meeting
This is like a cheat code for driving accountability. If you start every single meeting by reviewing actions from the last meeting, your team will soon make sure that they are taking accountability actions that are assigned to them!
Ensure that all tasks have a deadline and owner assigned
If a task doesn’t have a deadline, it doesn’t get prioritised. If a task doesn’t have an owner, it doesn’t get done. Set standards in your team so that all tasks have an owner and deadline assigned which is a simple, but effective way to ensure that accountability is taken care of when it comes to day-to-day tasks and projects.
Don’t fix mistakes for your team
If your team makes a mistake on a project or a task, it can be very tempting to grab hold of the task yourself and fix it. This is often because it feels more efficient for you to just fix things, especially when the fix takes maybe a few seconds or a few minutes.
The thing is, by doing this, you’re actually removing accountability rather than giving it to someone. They are accountable for the task being completed to the right standard, so any mistakes or improvements should be owned by them as well.
So, that should be more than enough to get you started with embedding accountability into your team, but remember, it isn’t something that you can just “do” – it takes time and needs consistent management and oversight.
