Businesses revolve around customers – and you need to be confident that your key stakeholder is being serviced well.
If you don’t build a culture of accountability, one that you and your employees uphold, it will soon start affecting the conduct of your employees and your bottom line.
When accountability is practiced, the business and all stakeholders will share in the success.
Accountability benchmarks
A culture of accountability requires a measure to gauge results
At its most basic level, this measure starts with shared values, then continues with ongoing goal setting.
Shared vision and values are the foundation of accountability, as they inform expected attitudes and behaviours, and allow all employees to participate in achieving a goal.
Vision provides commitment to the business and a commitment to each other.
Separate the wheat from the chaff
Most businesses would have someone (or a few people!) that get in the way of progress.
Things like double standards, attitudes, indifference, entitled thinking, procrastination and laziness need to be removed in order for the team to work cohesively together.
Make it stick
Simply sharing your vision will not make it ‘stick’. You need to nurture and support your team.
A training program is a good way to teach employees the skills they need to be accountable to the vision, and to teach them how to measure their own success.
The culture of many
Accountability should be expected in every role.
Create visibility around who is accountable for what compared to the goals. Through this approach, individuals are not only accountable, but others can see that they are accountable.
Accountability should come from the top – you need to model the behaviour you seek.
Ensure you are setting performance standards for yourself as well as others and be transparent in achieving them.
Where you do fall short, be open and talk about it and how you’re improving.
Accountability is about more than intentions; it is about exhibiting behaviours and achieving results to which you have committed.
