Unlocking Team Potential: 3 Pillars of Effective Accountability
Unlocking Team Potential: 3 Pillars of Effective Accountability
As a leader, one of our primary responsibilities is to ensure team members are delivering results and completing what they are responsible for. When everyone is individually hitting their marks, the business wins.
To achieve this, accountability across the company is crucial. But holding people accountable is challenging. It requires a balance of clarity, consistency, and empathy at the right time.
Many leaders struggle with what to do when their team isn’t performing and find themselves asking this question on repeat >> Why isn’t everyone just doing what they are supposed to!?
3 Keys to Holding Your Team Accountable
1. establish clear expectations
To hold your team accountable, you must first establish clear expectations. It’s very difficult for us to create success when we are unclear on the definition of success for a given scenario. Your team members should clearly understand what’s expected of them and what the end results need to look like.
Communicate these expectations and goals in a way that ensures that everyone is on the same page and allows the team members to ask questions, express concerns, and offer feedback. Ensure your team members understand how their work contributes to the team's and the organization's overall success. A sense of purpose and contribution is a powerful motivator.
2. consistently monitor performance
We Get What We Inspect, not What We Expect. Once you have established clear expectations, monitoring your team's performance is crucial. Team management is not a set-it-and-forget-it process. Regularly reviewing team members' work and results and providing timely feedback are pillars of good leadership.
As Brene Brown says ‘Clarity is Kind’. Never is this more true than when providing feedback. Because so many of us find negative feedback uncomfortable, it can be tempting to sugarcoat or gloss over things that aren’t working. Being wishy-washy with feedback will not get you the results you are looking for and will lead to more frustration for you and your team.
3. foster a culture of accountability
Holding your team accountable is not just about monitoring performance and providing feedback. It is also about fostering a culture of accountability. Encourage your team members to take ownership of their work and hold themselves accountable for their actions and results. Create a culture where team members feel comfortable openly discussing their progress and challenges.
Leading by example is critical to creating a culture of accountability. When your team sees you not walking your talk, they won’t feel motivated to own their results. Hold yourself accountable for your actions and decisions, and demonstrate accountability with your team.
While the above keys to accountability are not complex, they can be challenging to consistently maintain when you are the only one leading this charge in the business. As an Operations professional, one of my key responsibilities in the companies I support is team accountability - setting clear expectations for the team, monitoring the execution of those expectations and encouraging ownership and leadership accountability.
If you’d like to explore bringing a leader onto your team to help implement these 3 strategies and maintain a culture of accountability, let’s connect!
Meet Kiva Slade - the Founder and CEO of The 516 Collaborative. With a unique background in high-power politics on Capitol Hill and sixteen years as a homeschooling mama, Kiva found her calling in the online business world as a trusted guide for entrepreneurs looking to build the business of their dreams.
Kiva's work began behind the scenes, orchestrating the back end of businesses and managing teams. But her inner data diva couldn't help but notice that small businesses needed help harnessing the power of data for growth. So she and her team set out to uncover and tidy up the data required to enable clients to grow their businesses confidently and easily.