Want Accountability Within Your Team?

Regardless of which role you occupy within an organization, every employee should have an answer to the following questions:

• What is the role of my department?
• What are my professional goals?
• What are the tools and resources to accomplish them?
• How does my service (or lack of service) serve our team's, division's, and company's purposes?

You should also have agreed-upon metrics to ensure that you are doing your job as expected by management.

Like many things, accountability is a trade-off. Too little accountability can result in low motivation, productivity & errors. Too much can result in blame culture and also errors where the incentive its to hide one's mistakes rather than deal with them.

 

Consider the extent to which performance can tangibly be measured. In a sporting environment for example, accountability is often more effective because performance can be boiled down into metrics like points scored, distance run etc. Although this is also imperfect, in football/soccer, a player may avoid risky passes that improve the chances of scoring a goal in order to keep their pass completion stats high. Clearly this is not in the interests of the team as a whole.

 

A problem occurs in corporate environments where often many people contribute to the outcome of an objective. Organisations come up with vague metrics such as customer excellence or innovation, and evidence this with feedback from colleagues. But this tends to reward political skills, which may or may not be useful for the role.

 

In this case I advise breaking teams into smaller units and incentivising them around shared goals. There should be accountability around individuals' behaviour/ways of working and this should be set by the unit and agreed by all.

 

In the end there is no substitute for emotionally intelligent managers that are bought into your mission. Get these people right and the results will look after themselves.