The Role of Accountability in Effective Team Management

As leaders, one of our primary responsibilities is to ensure team members deliver results and successfully complete their responsibilities. When everyone hits their mark individually, the business wins.

To achieve this, accountability across the company is crucial. But holding people accountable is challenging. It requires a balance of clarity, consistency, and empathy at the right time. Many leaders struggle with what to do when their team isn’t performing and find themselves asking this question on repeat >> Why isn’t everyone just doing what they are supposed to?!

3 Keys to Holding Your Team Accountable

Establish Clear Expectations
To hold your team accountable, you must first establish clear expectations. It’s very difficult for any of us to create success when we are unclear on the definition of success for a given scenario. Your team members should clearly understand what’s expected of them and what the end results need to look like.

Communicate these expectations and goals in a way that ensures everyone is on the same page and allows team members to ask questions, express concerns, and offer feedback. Ensure your team members understand how their work contributes to the team’s and the organization’s overall success. A sense of purpose and contribution is a powerful motivator.

Consistently Monitor Performance
We Get What We Inspect, not What We Expect. Once you have established clear expectations, monitoring your team’s performance is crucial. Team management is not a set-it-and-forget-it process. Regularly reviewing team members’ work and results and providing timely feedback are pillars of good leadership.

As Brene Brown says, ‘Clarity is Kind.’ Never is this more true than when providing feedback. Because so many of us find negative feedback uncomfortable to give, it can be tempting to sugarcoat or gloss over things that aren’t working. Being wishy-washy with feedback will not get you the results you are looking for and will simply lead to more frustration for you and your team.

Foster a Culture of Accountability
Holding your team accountable is about more than just monitoring performance and providing feedback. It is also about fostering a culture of accountability. Encourage your team members to take ownership of their work and hold themselves accountable for their actions and results. Create a culture where team members feel comfortable openly discussing their progress and challenges.

Leading by example is critical to creating a culture of accountability. When your team sees you not walking your talk, they won’t feel motivated to own their results. Hold yourself accountable for your actions and decisions, and demonstrate accountability with your team.

While the above keys to accountability are simple, they can be challenging to consistently maintain when you are the only one leading this charge in the business. As a Certified OBM®, one of my key responsibilities in the businesses I support is team accountability – setting clear expectations for the team, monitoring the execution of those expectations, and encouraging ownership and leadership accountability.

If you’d like to explore bringing a leader onto your team to help implement these 3 strategies and maintain a culture of accountability, I’d love to connect.