Episode #240: Accountability Starts With The Leader

Holding our people accountable is one of the basics of being a leader. They flounder, deadlines pass unheeded, things get missed, work is not completed to a satisfactory standard. Why is that? People are not trying to fail in their jobs, but they do let the team down with their poor performance and lack of accountability. What can we do about it?

As the leader we have to start with ourselves. The most crucial resource we have is our time and how we choose to use it. If we are poor time managers, then we apply unnecessary stress to our own lives and those of our colleagues. We show up with unreasonable turnaround times for work, because we were not properly organised. We become very stressed and that spreads like an epidemic across the team. Our stress immediately impacts our mood control and our mood can lighten or darken the workplace within seconds.

We are time poor because we haven't done a good enough job on defining our priorities. We are also rushing around because we are doing too much. The reason we are so busy is because we are unable to delegate our work properly. We tried it once, there were errors, problems, rework and we decided, "it is faster if I do it myself". This is false economy, because we can't do everything by ourselves. We need to gain leverage from accessing the full power of the team. Delegation is also an important driver of career development for our successors. By giving them some of our tasks, we can start to groom them for higher things.

In large companies, promotions are often decided by boards. It is beneficial to be able to say you have been doing a number of delegated asks for the leader of the section and have been successfully operating at that level in the current position.

The reason why we think delegation doesn't work is because we have been doing it the wrong way. Done correctly, it can help us to use our time for those tasks that only we can perform. One of them is coaching our people. Leaders imagine they are coaching their people, but in reality, they are just handing out orders. The accountability of the team is closely linked to the amount of time and energy we invest in coaching them. If we are stretched too thin, then we have very little time for developing our staff. It becomes a vicious cycle where we don’t invest in them because we are too busy and then later we can’t delegate higher levels tasks to them.

We always want higher outcomes, which means we either do something new or something old, but in a slightly new way. That means change and people resist change. They resist it because they don't want to step outside their Comfort Zones. If we want them to step up, we have to coach them, delegate to them and hold them accountable for the results. All of these aspects are linked together and we need a rising tide to lift all boats, by applying a comprehensive approach to leading.

When we have time, we are in a strong position to monitor progress and check on milestones. Unpleasant surprises are never greeted well by the organization’s hierarchy and we don't want to be the bearer of bad news because one of our team missed a deadline or a quality standard or compliance with a regulation. Delegation is not dumping work on people. It is taking the time to explain the Why, the What and the How. It is having them take ownership and having them see this as a stepping stone to bigger things. In this way, the sense of ownership of the task and therefore the accountability is strong. It means coaching them on the way through to completion of the task so that there are only pluses and no minuses.

We give them a task to work on, we encourage them to decide how to execute the task and we check in regularly to see how it is tracking. There is nothing worse than to find that the project has been taken off in a direction we could never have imagined would be possible and which doesn’t deliver the outcomes we need. Or worse we find out about it too late to fix it. There is a balance here between micro-managing and checking in and that is the right balance we need to uncover.

So if we want accountability in our team we start with ourselves. If we have good time control we can better lead and we can have the necessary time to better communicate with our team. We are able to walk our talk because we are in control and can deliver what we say we will do. This is how people judge whether we are trustworthy or not. If we want people to deliver we have to deliver for them. That means giving them a chance to grow in their careers, supporting them through coaching and being consistent in our mood, behavior and interactions. We are able to do this because we are not stressed through poor time control and trying to do too much by ourselves. We need to adaptable to change because business is in constant flux and the market waits for no one. We need to create new, better habits and become better leaders.