If you regularly hear comments like it’s not my fault, I didn’t have enough time, or my personal favorite … I didn’t know I was supposed to do that, nobody told me, you probably don’t work in an Accountability Friendly Organization.
“Responsibility equals accountability equals ownership. And a sense of ownership is the most powerful weapon a team or organization can have.” – Pat Summitt American women’s college basketball head coach Content goes here
Here are six tips for creating ownership and for building your Accountability Friendly Organization:
- Draw The Big Picture: People need to know where they fit in your organization. It’s important to provide information on how their role impacts other team members, customers, and your overall business. Your team members will then realize that they will let others down if they don’t take accountability for their part.
- Be Crystal Clear: It’s a lack of clarity that creates confusion and frustration. It’s difficult to be accountable if you aren’t clear on what you are supposed to do. Use the 5 W’s to provide clarity around priorities: Who, what, when, where, why and how.
- Ask for Buy-In: Buy-in results in commitment and a willingness to go the extra mile to achieve results. This can only happen when participation and two way dialog is used to explore all alternatives. Accountability increases once a person says YES and commits to the assignment.
- Make Mistakes a Learning Tool: Organizations who have an accountability culture have team members who first acknowledge their mistakes and then analyze what they can do to prevent it from happening again. Compare this to an environment of punishing mistakes which results in not taking the risk to own them and improve.
- Lead the Way: Leaders define corporate culture, so if you want to create a culture of accountability, it must start with the leader. When leaders follow through on their commitments and demonstrate accountability every day, others will see that this concept is more than just talk.
- Provide Feedback: To hold someone accountable is to care about them enough to them to provide feedback to help them improve. This sometimes takes courage knowing you may experience interpersonal discomfort when dealing with negative or emotional reactions to feedback. But giving feedback is always worth it to be able to see team members grow!
So how can an organization build accountability into the culture so that it becomes the core driver for achieving amazing business results? One way is to have your team schedule a Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team session. For more information http://managementskillsinc.com/products/five-behaviors/
Or contact us at: Deborah.Avrin@ManagementSkillsinc.com 972 881-5282.