4 Leadership Practices to Establish Healthy Accountability with a Fatigued Workforce

The best leaders understand that healthy accountability is about empowerment—not control. Much of the workforce is tired, overworked, and already experiencing high stress. A leader who relies too much on authority to push accountability will create frustration and resistance with their employees.

Effective leadership requires building strong relationships and creating an environment where employees can deliver results. As employees continue to feel the lingering effects of a global pandemic and a continuously shifting work environment, finding the right balance of empathy and accountability can be a daunting task for even the most seasoned leaders.??

4 Leadership Practices to Establish Healthy Accountability

1) People First

The central role of leadership is to create an environment where employees feel valued, included, motivated, and capable of doing their best work. This healthy environment requires employees to believe their leaders care about their well-being and professional success. The following list from the Gallup Organization shares research on how the best managers support employee engagement by focusing on both building relationships and performance:

• Results-oriented while concurrently focused on developing every worker
• Intentionally give employees a voice in decision making
• Ensure people feel connected and know how their work contributes to the team and organization
• Routinely make people feel valued and appreciated—even nurtured
• Care deeply about the well-being of every person they lead

How would your employees answer the question, "Does your manager care about your well-being and professional success?"

2) Demonstrate Empathy

Empathy is "the ability to understand and share the feelings of another." Research repeatedly shows that empathy is essential for leaders to exhibit emotional intelligence, design thinking, high performance, effective teamwork, healthy relationships, and clear communication. Leaders demonstrate empathy by asking quality questions and listening to their employees.

Taking the time to ask questions demonstrates that the leader understands they do not have all the information and value input from their team members to make effective decisions. These positive conversations with employees enable managers to establish a culture where employees feel valued, safe, empowered, and motivated.?

Below are two types of questions leaders should regularly ask their employees.

Questions targeted at understanding other’s perspectives

• What is working? / “What is not working?
• What does success look like? / How important is this to you?
• How are you doing during this challenging time?

Questions that generate forward-focused solutions

• What do you think we should do next?
• What is the biggest obstacle, and how can we overcome it?
• What support do you need from me and others?
• What actions should we plan to take next?

?3) Agile Goals and Priorities

With the increase in virtual work and matrixed reporting relationships, creating clear expectations for employees has become a growing challenge for leaders. Goals and priorities give direction to a team, allowing them to understand where they are now, define where they want to go, and unite each team member's effort in getting there. Teams must develop the capacity to continually assess and reset, when necessary, their priorities to meet new challenges and remain on track for success. The following questions can help teams reflect and adapt to a shifting environment.

• What has changed?
• What have we learned?
• How do we need to work differently?
• What do we need to stop doing?
• How do we need to update our goals, priorities, or processes?

When goals shift, team members need to understand why the new priority better supports their overall purpose, how they plan to make this shift, and what actions they will take towards success.

?4) Shared Problem-Solving?

Empowerment cannot occur without including the team in the problem-solving process. Inclusion is required for employees to feel shared ownership and control. A team's success is dependent on its collective ability to identify and resolve ongoing issues that continually arise.?

Resolving the issues that get in the way of accomplishing team goals should be the central component of the team's recurring meetings. Below are best practices for teams that excel with inclusive problem-solving.

• A defined process for how the team resolves issues and problems.
• Prioritize issues before the problem-solving starts. Solving the most critical challenges first is vital to ensure the bulk of the time is not focused on less important matters.
• Clear expectations that every team member's input is valued and expected when working through team issues.

A meeting agenda focusing on problem-solving enables the team to develop their muscle for successfully addressing ongoing issues and opportunities.

A leader’s primary role is to create an environment where employees can deliver on expectations while feeling valued and heard. When employees or teams are off-track or miss deliverables, it should not be a reason for punitive actions from the leader. Successful teams understand that failure is part of success as long as they use the setback as an opportunity to learn, adjust, and take shared actions to get back on track. Accountability is the foundation for building teams that deliver outstanding results and have strong relationships.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

I am the President and Founder of ClearView Leadership, an innovative leadership and talent development consulting firm helping executives and managers bring their best leadership selves to their most challenging situations. I am the author of,?Getting It Right When It Matters Most: Self-Leadership For Work & Life . You can also follow me on?Forbes ?to see my latest articles on Self-Leadership and Leading Others.