Who's Accountable for Accountability?

By Sajib Hossain01
 Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0
 httpscommons.wikimedia.org
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How many times have you or one of your managers said, “Employees just won’t take responsibility. They don’t want to be accountable.” Well, Mr./Ms. Employer, if your employees don’t take responsibility, it’s probably, to a great degree, your fault.

Some employees are sufficiently self-motivated to do what needs to be done, regardless of the circumstances. A few will perform poorly, regardless of what you do, until you let them go. But the vast majority of your employees want to do a good job but need occasional course corrections. The truth is, the performance of most employees will sink to the level the organization will accept. Organizations tend to drag good performers down. Therefore, it is vital to pay attention to the messages we send by our daily actions.

The responsibility for creating an accountability culture belongs to the leaders in the organization. Here are some accountability basics:

•         Set standards and communicate them—clearly and often. Everyone needs to know what’s expected of them.
•          Don’t encourage the “blame game.” To have an accountability culture, you have to have open communication where people can accept responsibility and admit mistakes. If your response to mistakes is "off with his head," you can bet you won't hear about them or if you do, fingers will be pointing at others. You don’t have to accept repeated errors from someone, but we all fall short sometimes.
•          Correct poor performance. People have to be told when their performance falls short of the standard so they can improve, and there need to be consequences when they do not.
•          Reward superior performance. We tend to focus on telling people where they fall short—recognize instead where they excel. There should be a clear tie between rewards and results.
•          Don’t let excellent performance in one area provide carte blanche for an employee to disregard other standards. Too often we allow the best technician/salesperson/etc. to be a jerk or get away with violating our ethics or values in other areas.

As a leader in your organization, you are responsible for setting and enforcing standards—you should be held accountable for accountability in your organization. Accountability starts at the top.

Mediocrity vs. High Performance

I came across the title of an article today that was contrary to what I seem to teach in my leadership courses, 'Collaboration' Creates Mediocrity, Not Excellence, Says Science. So of course, I had to read it.

Photo by rawpixel.com on Unsplash

As it turns out, the article isn't disagreeing with what I am telling people, but it focuses on the negative aspects of team collaboration instead of providing a solution.

The average team isn't very effective. According to Dr. Eunice Parisi-Cerew, 60% of teams fail to accomplish their objectives. If Johnny brought home a report card with this sort of grade, we would be very unhappy, and we'd be sitting on him until results improved. In the workplace, we tend to tolerate mediocrity. That's what I see as the most important underlying theme of the article, and it is barely mentioned at all.

We do tend to allow people to get by in the workplace. If they are doing satisfactory work, we allow it. Instead of merely looking for the trappings of team collaboration, we should be shooting for high performance results. Yes, in many of the average teams, high performers tend to carry others. Eventually, the person doing the carrying is going to get mad and go somewhere else--and the effort collapses.

Collaboration is merely working together to produce or create something--there is nothing in the definition that indicates the quality or value of what is created. When we focus merely on collaboration, we are focusing on form over substance. Instead of collaboration being the end result, collaboration should be a tool to achieve the result.

High performance teams are different. They focus on results--not just mediocre results, but outstanding results. They hold one another accountable. They are not afraid to communicate expectations and to push one another.

I am not a believer in having all A players on a team. They bring their own problems. But I am a big believer in developing balanced teams of high potential players--may be they're B's now, but they are willing to work hard and work together toward outstanding results. I have seen a group of B players achieve better results than one with multiple A players because they were focused on a team win, not a personal best.

Creating and nurturing high performance teams is hard work. It isn't luck. And it begins with a focus on high performance standards, not merely collaboration.