Its my fault - Leadership Accountability

Accountability in Leadership

I was recently at a leadership event and during the event the audience was asked ‘what is leadership?’. We ended up with a flip chart list with various components of leadership. The list included traits such as empathy, encouragement, motivation, and many others.

Of the list of 20+ traits I was surprised to see accountability was not mentioned.

In a room full of leaders, I found this quiet alarming however after reflecting upon this it seemed consistent with my years of observation of managers and leaders. Shifting blame, assigning responsibility, an unwillingness to risk from fear, and ambiguity of responsibilities isn’t uncommon.

I believe accountability is one of the most important tenants of leadership and I began thinking about why this is often lacking in leadership.

Causes

Character

This is one of the most common causes of a lack of accountability and one of the most difficult to change. However, with time, intentionality, and effort this can be consistently improved. John Maxwell has one of my favorite leadership quotes which is ‘as a leader you must be bigger on the inside than on the outside to maintain your leadership influence’. Adopting the character to take the responsibility of results upon yourself as the leader is essential. This adoption of responsilbity and ownership of outcomes is a behavior leaders need to work on week in week out.

Competence

Individuals are often promoted into a management or leadership positions because they have demonstrated competency in a specific field of expertise. Unfortunately, it’s often the case the expectations and standards of the manager are the same standards they would place upon themselves in their expert field. Managers and leaders can fail to realise they are now accountable not for delivering the expertise themselves but enabling, coaching and developing others to develop to the same if not beyond their level of expertise. Leaders need to practice empathy with their report and ask themselves the question how can I enable and equip my report to executive effectively.

Clarity

In many teams and businesses leaders and managers do not have clear direction on their roles and responsibilities. Clarifying roles and responsibilities can enable leaders to take responsibility for outcomes and influence results more effectively. The responsibility of a leader with leaders and managers as direct reports is to facilitate effect swim lanes, with clear responsibilities and effective progress reporting.