Making Accountability a Reality at Your Organization

Have you ever been disappointed or even frustrated by an employee’s or colleague’s actions, or lack thereof? Maybe you have an employee who frequently fails to submit his weekly reports. Or perhaps you work with a colleague who spends meeting time with her face buried in her phone.

​On the flip side, it’s equally as annoying to be pestered and micromanaged by a leader who doesn’t know a more effective way to ensure that people follow through on their commitments.

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The truth is, helping people be accountable is hard. Most leaders I speak to admit they struggle with this task. In fact, in a 2019 Benchmarking Report by The Predictive Index, CEOs revealed that their biggest weakness was “holding people accountable.”

Why Accountability Matters

But when we don’t help others be accountable, we experience real consequences that affect the bottom line.
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For example, in their multi-year, Workplace Accountability Study of more than 40,000 employees, Partners in Leadership discovered that organizations without a culture of accountability have:

• Misalignment around key priorities and desired results
• Low trust
• Problems with collaboration
• Declining engagement levels
• Ineffective execution of initiatives
• Increased turnover

​When you can’t count on being able to implement projects well, or you don’t know if your employees will hang around long enough to get the work done, you’ve got a serious problem.

The Value of Taking Action

​The good news is you can build a culture of accountability, and it is worth the effort!
 
After decades of writing and testing hundreds of questions to build their Q12 Employee Engagement Survey – which includes the accountability question of “Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work?” – Gallup discovered that organizations whose employees respond positively to these questions have lower turnover, higher profits, and increased customer loyalty.
 
In my own coaching and workplace strategy practice, I’ve found that teams who focus on improving team cohesion and accountability also improve across other team dimensions. This chart shows how one team I coached saw significant improvements across the board, moving them to a “high” performance level and increasing their confidence in leadership.

How to Build Employee and Colleague Accountability

​There are several ways to build accountability. For this post, I will focus on the one attribute any leader can personally control and implement today to build a culture of accountability:

Your willingness to let others know when they are or are not living up to agreed-upon performance standards and behaviors.

​For best results, I recommend that you start with building employee (direct report) accountability, then add colleague accountability as you gain confidence and competence.

1. Build Employee Accountability

If your team sees you helping one of their colleagues to be accountable, they’ll feel safe doing the same. But how can you do this in a way that empowers everyone, even the person who may have failed to be accountable? Here are five steps that have worked for my clients:

• Set expectations. Ensure first that team members have the ability and tools to meet those expectations. Once this is in place, confirm their understanding of the expectations, including timing, quality, behaviors, and measures.
• Give frequent feedback. Don’t wait until team members fall short. Give feedback all the time.  When they meet expectations, be specific, and let them know how they positively affected others.  When they miss the mark, be specific, describing the gap as compared to the set expectation, and let them know the impact (e.g., to their reputation, your relationship/trust, the team, the customer, or the organization). 
• Ask why. If there’s a miss, you want to understand the reason.  Listen to understand.  Don’t interrupt.  No judgment.  Learn their why.  Ask questions from a place of curiosity rather than one of affixing blame.
• Ask what.  Ask them what they need to do and what you can do to ensure they meet expectations going forward.
• Agree on what they will do differently to meet expectations, and reiterate any commitments you’ve made. Discuss your approach for feedback, measurement, timing, and, if necessary, consequences.

2. Build Colleague Accountability

​As difficult as it is to help direct reports with accountability, it’s even more difficult with colleagues.  Because you don’t have authority over colleagues, there’s a risk that they’ll feel you’re blaming or trying to manage them. So, I suggest a different approach than you’d take with a direct report. Here’s what’s worked for my clients: 

• Gain clarity. Confirm you’re on the same page.  Ideally, teams should have Operating Agreements. The team I showcased above created an operating agreement that they still live by.  These agreements should include a handful of meaningful behaviors that create a high degree of trust, define how the team makes decisions, and identify what happens if team members don’t follow through on commitments.
• Acknowledge the gap. Approach it from a place of compassion and empathy, and provide detail around the gap.  For example: “I was wondering why I didn’t receive the report?”, or “I noticed you’ve been late for our project meeting the last few times.”  Be empathetic, ask what’s going on (e.g. maybe they have too much on their plate?)
• Share the impact. Be specific. For example: Maybe their actions caused you to work into the night, or caused you to submit your work late. Perhaps you missed a commitment to an outside group, or the product or service wasn’t up to par. In some cases, their action – or inaction – affected how they’re perceived or eroded trust.
• Re-negotiate/re-clarify. Confirm shared understanding of what’s expected in the future. Let them know that you care about people keeping their word, and obtain their commitment.

Rising to the Occasion

No doubt about it: It can be uncomfortable to give – and receive – corrective feedback for accountability. That’s why most of us try to avoid it.  But when we don’t make the effort to help others raise their game, we deprive them of the opportunity to grow further. 

In one study about the efficacy of feedback, teachers grading student essays gave detailed feedback to students throughout each paper.

  At the end of the paper, they concluded their feedback in one of two ways:

• On half of the papers, they closed with: “I’m giving you these comments because I have high expectations and I know you can reach them.”  This is known as wise feedback.
• On the other half of the papers, they said: “I’m giving you these comments so you’ll have feedback.”  This is known as neutral feedback.

All students were then given an opportunity to revise their papers for a new grade.

Of those who received “wise feedback,” 71% revised their papers.

Of those who receive “neutral feedback,” just 17% revised their papers.

The moral of the story? When we set high expectations, express our faith in others’ ability to achieve them, and offer regular feedback and support, they will almost always rise to the occasion.

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This article was adapted from a “Holding Peers Accountable” presentation that Lisa gave to leaders at the 2019 Western Association of College and University Business Officers (WACUBO) Annual Conference in May.

Image credits: Nichol Luoma and rawpixel on Pixabay