Building a Culture of Accountability
If you want to build a successful team, there is at least one question you must eliminate. Unfortunately, it’s one of the most common questions anytime something goes less than perfectly. Miss a projection, someone asks. Lose a sale, someone asks. Find a mistake, someone asks. Miss a meeting, ship a faulty product or release a stupid public statement…fingers get pointed, and everyone asks… “Who did it?”
That’s a terrible question. Here’s why. First of all, pointing fingers wastes time. Worse, having to ask that question indicates someone – perhaps everyone – is unsure about his or her responsibilities. While that’s not an uncommon problem in business, it cannot be an issue if you want to be successful.
There are several ways to establish a business environment in which this question is rare if it is ever asked at all.
First, give everyone clear areas of responsibility as well as clearly-defined success benchmarks. I’m not saying you should only have one person doing each specific job. It’s always good to have cross-trained people who can step in when necessary. The idea here is to have a clearly defined structure of responsibility. If something goes wrong, you can point to one person and find out how it happened.
Next, establish an environment where competition is high, but it’s always trumped by collective achievement. Look, unless you are working on a trading floor or in a cut-throat commission sales outfit, you are all on the same team hoping to achieve the same goals. Find ways to motivate your team to think this way. Shared bonuses, group celebrations, whatever it takes to motivate everyone on your team to excel.
Speaking of, if you don’t have the right people in the right places, not only is failure unavoidable, but the person responsible may not even understand what they did or didn’t do to create that situation. This goes back to step one. You don’t need “someone” in a given job. You need the best possible person doing that job. Hire, train and staff accordingly.
One of the best byproducts of having a culture of accountability is that solutions are much closer than they would be otherwise. If you know who is responsible, you likely have a better idea what happened. That makes you one step away from getting it fixed.
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