Accountability. The word gets thrown around a lot. One of those vague yet evergreen leadership topics, like strategy, influence, and communication.
When folks talk about accountability what I hear them saying is they want colleagues that take responsibility for their actions, who have an awareness of what they are doing and why, and are able to share that reasoning with others.
This usually comes up in coaching conversations when there is a perceived lack of accountability and a leader is wondering how to “hold people accountable”.
Holding people accountable, however, is entirely the wrong approach. Just look at what the phrase implies: that someone (usually the manager) has to force accountability on someone who is seemingly incapable of being accountable on their own. The power dynamic this sets up is problematic.
What’s even more problematic is that this happens late in the game. It is only when the expectation of accountability isn’t met that accountability becomes an issue. At which point the idea of holding people accountable becomes a blame game, a very sticky place for a manager to be.
Conversations that come from a place of blame are at best unproductive. And this sadly misses what accountability is really about: a way of expressing your belief in the potential of the people around you, entrusting them to take on challenges and push themselves to achieve big things.
At root, I think, is the belief that accountability is something that either happens or doesn’t, and that the most we can do as leaders is enforce it.
Thankfully this is not the case! Leaders have an essential role to play in cultivating cultures of accountability. The shift comes from understanding that accountability is build through relationships and sustained with intentional practice.
This is what I call “upfront accountability”, where accountability conversations happen early and often, as an intrinsic part of how work gets done.
What does this look like in practice? There are four critical components to any upfront accountability conversation: create clear conditions of satisfaction, ensure mutual understanding, prompt for ownership, and plan for getting stuck.
- Create clear conditions of satisfaction. How will you know when the work has been completed successfully? These conditions are critical for accountability, for they outline the requirements and commitments that must be met for the work to be considered complete.
- Ensure mutual understanding. At the end of any conversation that requires accountability, have the person repeat back to you their understanding of what was discussed, decisions that were made, and what needs to happen next. “What are you taking away from this conversation?” is one way to check for this.
- Prompt for ownership. My favorite way to ask this is the combo question, “What will you do by when and how will you let me know?”
- Plan for getting stuck. How will this person handle getting stuck or off track? “What will you do if you get stuck?” is sufficient to spark some ideas around how to handle the unexpected, and is precisely the kind of question that mitigates the need to hold someone accountable down the line.
Building accountability into conversations from the beginning is a leadership practice, one that creates supportive scaffolding and clear commitments from the get-go, so that everyone is set up for success.
