Empowering Your Team with Accountability and Discipline

Empowering Your Team with Accountability and Discipline

When economic times become more difficult, many companies start looking to cut costs and improve sales. However, success often comes down to two things: accountability and discipline. When times are good, it’s easier to find success without these two elements, but almost impossible when competition increases and business gets harder. It’s important to find the balance between the two so that they work together to achieve the desired outcomes.

Often, people think of punishment or control when talking about discipline. I like to view discipline as a plan that includes the activities needed to create good habits and routines that help stay on track with reaching a goal. Being disciplined is how we grow, learn, and get better as we pursue success. It requires prioritizing time, energy, and mindset.

When it comes to accountability, it’s often thought of as a heavy burden or weight imposed by a leader. In reality, it’s about taking responsibility for your actions and commitments as part of a plan or team when aiming to reach a goal. Being accountable means looking at what happened, learning from our failures, celebrating our wins, looking to improve, and making adjustments as we progress.

When accountability and discipline come together, it usually happens in a team environment. You need both to achieve success. You also need clarity and agreement on the goal, focused time committed to the goal, and understanding of performance consequences. Consequences do not always mean punishment; they are the results of succeeding or failing. The consequence of winning can mean rewards, profits, bonuses, time off, or advancement. It can also mean additional training, reprimands, negative ratings, redoing work, or termination.

One of the fears with both accountability and discipline is failure. Much of that falls on the leader to explain that no goal is achieved without failures along the way. Mistakes are going to happen, and adjustments will need to be made. The key is being okay with owning up to what happened and why, then making adjustments to learn, grow, and get back on track. It’s important to stay disciplined in what needs to happen next. What’s done is done. Discipline then becomes about using our time better, making better decisions, and prioritizing our tasks.

To help a team achieve mutual accountability requires a high level of trust and transparency. If the goals are clear, agreed upon, and metrics are set, then it comes down to being disciplined. The leader must provide regular feedback to both individuals and the group. This includes holding individuals responsible for meeting established activities and objectives. When a group falls out of accountability, it’s either because the leader or the group allows others to make excuses, blame others, or ignore failures without making adjustments, providing training, or implementing consequences for continued poor discipline. Similarly, a leader who doesn’t celebrate success will have a team that feels their work wasn’t valued.

With clearly outlined goals and expectations, discipline can lead to significant improvements in performance, productivity, and success. It should not involve fear but rather trust, respect, and teamwork. Leaders need to give their team the tools and resources they need to be successful. Empower them with training, development, coaching, and rewards. This requires everyone to track progress both individually and collectively as a team in a public setting that requires accountability and check-ins on either a daily or weekly basis. I hope you find both accountability and discipline to be positive elements and use them on the path to great success.