We Want ALL the “A-Words” / What’s the Deal with Accountability?
Every manager or leader I’ve worked with wants to know their people will be accountable for things important to the job: meeting goals, providing excellent service, caring about quality, and committing to innovation. We all want people to follow up and follow through, to have integrity with their word. We’d like them to take ownership of whatever’s at hand or whatever we’ve agreed to and go with it.
On good days we might be mildly annoyed when they don’t show this consistent commitment; on other days, we’re ready to don our Terminator T-shirts.
What’s the deal with accountability? Why do we spend so much time dealing with the lack of it or worrying about it?
As in all leader conversations, we must check our reflections before going out the door. Be willing to identify and accept your role in helping create a more accountable culture by creating an environment that supports it.
We know that the most significant difference between a culture of commitment versus a culture of compliance is that in commitment cultures, everyone is doing the right things because they want to, whereas the latter means everyone is doing something only because they have to. Want-to cultures and teams are much easier to manage and support than have-to cultures!
Here are three things to consider as you nurture a culture of commitment with high levels of accountability:
Believe in the agency of each person’s potential: someone has personal agency when they believe in and have confidence in their ability to make their way through something. Often, we make up our minds about someone’s agency because we’ve abandoned presuming good intent (an Influencing Options foundational principle), and we’ve become tired and doubtful, or we are exhausted and cynical. We predict someone’s ability to follow up and follow through because of past mistakes or just how we are currently seeing things. What if we refocused our conversations and coaching on instilling confidence and holding the person as capable? In other words, unless there is a very, very good reason to foresee failure, let’s start by believing in the potential for success and providing the support and specificity to set them up.
Give as much autonomy as possible to engage someone’s creativity and spirit. Dan Pink’s Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us told us about the importance of autonomy to improve the motivation and engagement of employees. When people believe they can chart their path or have a stake and influence in how things go, they are more motivated to work toward the intended goal. When managing performance, you rarely need to control everything about how someone meets the goal. Your primary focus should be to be clear about the destination, be specific about the success criteria to be completed, provide a timeframe, and then let them do it. Give good guidelines and parameters, and then give them the independence to make it happen.
Accountability is making committed actions toward an agreement. In our Influencing Options classes, we talk about how to close the gap between a verbal commitment and a behavioral commitment: that’s demonstrated accountability. Many say they are committed, believe in the mission, or understand the goals, but their behaviors close that gap and create ownership. Sometimes, there are challenges or obstacles to someone’s ability to demonstrate this accountability consistently. We, as leaders, often don’t know about these challenges because we neglect our one-on-ones or check-ins, and we aren’t making the time and space for honest conversations about what’s happening.
Most of the time, my shorthand advice to leaders is this: it’s your job to set the vision and clearly articulate the goals. Then it’s your job to remove obstacles and get out of the way. All the other things work themselves out when we allow people agency and autonomy to show us how committed and accountable they can be.
Idealistic? Maybe. But this isn’t a blind belief in hoping for accountability; this is about making sure you’re doing all you can to set yourself and your team up for success. When you commit to a culture of commitment, you’ll get high trust, performance, and accountability!
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