How to make your team accountable for what they do.

This newsletter explores the Five Pillars of Authentic Leadership & this edition explores your Team Culture & how to put accountability at the heart of it. I will show you why accountability matters & some ways that you can build it with your team.

Why is accountability important?

Before we dig into the specific reasons for accountability, I want to share something that has hugely helped me to help leadership teams to put accountability at the heart of their Team Culture.

For this, I owe huge thanks to a proper superstar who I have had the pleasure of working with over the past few years. Hello Beth Lang ????

I could write a whole article on what makes Beth a superstar but in this one, I want to share something that Beth told me that helped me to see the importance of accountability......

The vast majority of people want to do the right thing

Beth also reminds me regularly that 'people come to work to do a good job'.

What has this got to do with accountability you might be asking. Well, it is forgetting these things that stop leaders from giving accountability to their teams.

Instead of seeing their team as people who want to do the right thing & are at work to do a good job, we start to see our team as the problem & start to believe that we have to do their jobs for them or constantly tell them what to do.

As soon as you lose sight of this, you take all the accountability on yourself as you deny your team the chance to do great work & take on new responsibility to develop themselves. Yo stop trusting your team to do their jobs which is a sure fire way of denying them accountability & you end up trying to the 'White Knight' who swoops in & tries to save everyone by solving their problems for them.

And that is the first step to building accountability - believe in your team to do their jobs.

No matter what has gone before or what mistakes they have made - that is in the past. Today is another chance for them to do a good job.

So many teams are ineffective & many individuals choose inertia not because they want to but because the leader has removed so much accountability that the easiest option for people is to just give up.

Trust the people around you to make the right choices

What does accountability do for leaders?

When you create a culture of accountability it: -

• Builds trust
• Builds high performing teams
• Builds confidence - in you & your team
• Enables better decision making

When you choose to make people accountable for what they do, yo show real leadership. You empower yourself to be the leader you want to be. It means you can set clear goals with your team & keep your promises to them. It is how you engage in meaningful conversations like giving feedback & praise.

If I look back at me as a leader who gave no accountability to my team, I see someone who was stressed, a perfectionist, worked long hours & was always trying to cover my arse to my boss & my peers. I was a leader who had toxic relationships with some of my team & wasted time & energy checking up on people trying to spot or prevent mistakes.

By Breaking the Mould & giving accountability to my team, I can reflect & see me as a leader who was calm & approachable, I took pride in my team doing things their way & role modelled focusing on things that are in my control. I build positive relationships with my team & challenged my boss & my peers to show them how hard my team were working.

What helped me to change was working with leaders who held me accountable & who challenged me to trust my team. I remember one of the best bosses I ever had asking me why I had worked a Bank Holiday & when I told them what I had been doing, they were very direct with me telling me "Tim, you have a team to do that work. What I want to know is if you're doing that then what the hell are your team doing?".

This made me realise that my team weren't the problem, I was because I was taking accountability away from them & thought that being a good leader meant doing the most work.

I also had a boss who told me that I was getting far too involved in my team's work & pushed me to lead NOT do. They were unequivocal in telling me "you need to be the worst Administrator in our team" because they could see that I was trying to better at their jobs than my team were.

Giving accountability to your team means you can be the leader that your team need you to be. All this BS about 'getting your hands dirty' doesn't mean that you need to be able to do your team's jobs for them. It simply means that you're prepared to be amongst your team when they need you to be. And the reality is that your team would much prefer you to be getting your hands dirty leading them & having their backs then being beside them doing what they're doing.

Thank people for holding you accountable

Your Team Culture must be built on accountability

Culture is how it feels to work in your team. And people must know that they will be held to account.

So many problems in organisational culture are because people think they can get away with things. Negative behaviour doesn't get called out & people can adopt a 'that's not my job' mentality because no-one as ever held them to account for being positive & for choosing to help people & use their initiative.

The first step to giving accountability to your team is to set expectations. Some leaders think they can only set expectations when they take over a new team. What BS! It is never too late to set expectations. And when you do this with your team, they contribute & then hold themselves to account because they want to live up to their own expectations.

Bring your team together & set expectations for how: -

• You will & won't behave
• You will build trust with each other
• You will respond to challenges
• You will own up to your mistakes
• You will achieve high performance

I'm a big fan of building a Team Charter & using it to inform how you work together & use it to build accountability.

When you have set those clear exceptions, giving feedback becomes more informed as you can ask your team what expectations they had set & how well they are living up to them. There is no wriggling out of the expectations you set for yourself.

This also leads to the promised land for leaders when your team start to hold each other to account to meet the expectations you have set together, then your culture really takes off.

Setting expectations means you can stop babysitting your team & start empowering them.

Build a culture for others to succeed

Get the balance right in your conversations to give accountability

Accountability isn't just given in the moment. When you have 121 time with your team, make sure you get the balance right for what you are talking to them about. This drives high performance & is achieved by regularly discussing three key areas that matter to your team: -

• YOU - talk about their attitudes & behaviours. Their hopes & fears. Their ambitions & development goals.
• The job - talk about their performance in their role. What they enjoy in their role. How their role contributes to overall team performance.
• The organisation - talk about the wider organisation & their place in it. How they feel about working there. Their relationships with peers & stakeholders. Raise their awareness of what is going on in other areas. What other areas of the organisation interest them & where they might want to progress to.

Getting this balance right gives you a holistic approach to giving your team accountability & by doing this in your 121's it means that your team expect you to do it in the moment. Here's what happens when you don't get the balance right: -

• Too much focus on YOU makes your team feel like you are micromanaging them & always picking holes in what they do. It also makes them feel like they can get away with doing less in their job or with the rest of the organisation because they think you will only talk about them.
• Constantly talking about the job makes your team feel like they don't matter & you only care about the job. This stops them being honest with you & develops a 'who cares?' attitude because they think you don't care about them.
• Making too much of the organisation makes you appear 'corporate' & that you are not focussed enough on your own team. This gives the impression that you are only there to progress your own career & will put your own goals before anything else. No-one likes a selfish leader.

Take a look at the 121 time with your team & challenge yourself to get the balance right to give accountability to your team for their high performance.

Think about you want to influence others

Make sure you know what your team are responsible for & are capable of

Do you really know what your team are responsible for & capable of? Do they?!

This isn't on their job descriptions. It is seen in what they do & how they do it. Too many leaders take this for granted & try to give their team accountability for something that they are not actually responsible for or don't have the confidence to do yet.

Be practical about this & build responsibility matrices with your team & agree with complete clarity who is responsible for what. And regularly observe what they are capable of & engage with them to find out what they think they are capable of. Give them feedback to raise awareness of how well they are taking responsibility & showing their capabilities.

When you get this completely clear, then you can give complete accountability for their responsibilities & what they can confidently do.

I used to try to get other people to be responsible for things that other people were meant to do or would ask people to do things that they just didn't have the capability to do. This makes people feel like they don't need to do things because other people will just end up doing them & makes them shy away from trying out new things because they feel scared from you putting them on the spot.

Always aim for clarity with your teams because that leads to accountability.

Coach your team in-the-moment

Taking the opportunity to coach your team in-the-moment is the golden ticket to giving them accountability. Coaching doesn't have to be saved up for 121's or be something that has to be formal or structured all the time. How you respond to your team raising things with you is where you can give them accountability.

This is achieved through a favourite leadership habit of mine - Ask; Don't Tell.

When teams raise issues with their leader, the easy option is to tell them what to do. When you do this you keep all accountability because if your team go & do what you tell them do to do it is on you whether it works or not. If it does work, your team don't feel any great sense of pride because they simply did hat they were told. And if it doesn't work then they forgo any accountability because you told them to do it. So it's your fault that it didn't work!

The best answer you can give to your team when they raise an issue is to ask a question. Choose your questions to give accountability: -

• When your team bring a problem to you & ask you what to do, always first ask 'what do you think you should do?'.
• When your team are moaning about something or banging on about 'so & so did this' or 'they should do this', ask them 'what are you going to do about it?'.
• When your team genuinely need your help on something, set the tone for them taking accountability by asking 'how can I help you to solve this?'.

Of course, you might need to add some context or summarise what they have told you before you ask the question & you can also re-articulate the questions. The most important thing here is asking the questions as it shows your team that you want them to take accountability & not just 'pass it up' to you.

Even if they can't answer the questions, just asking them shows your team that you trust them to solve things for themselves & that you want them to take accountability.

Create an environment where your team feels empowered

Without accountability, you will never lead the team that you want to lead

Accountability is a core part of leadership. It empowers teams & gives people freedom to learn & take on more responsibility. You must spend time with your team creating clarity & then let them get on with their jobs, taking the opportunity to hold them to account.

• Are you the kind of leader who allow or denies your team to take accountability?
• How will you remember that your team want to do a good job?
• What expectations do you need to set with your team?
• What are you talking to your team about?
• Do you really know what your team are responsible for & capable of?
• How do you give accountability in-the-moment?

Arrange a call here via to find out how I can help your leaders to give accountability to their teams.