How do I hold people accountable?

How do I hold people accountable?

One of the most common questions I get from leaders all the time is: how do I hold my people accountable? What do I need to do? Just fire people who aren't getting the job done? Lack of accountability causes frustration. Frustration on the part of the leader, the team, your employees, your customers, your vendors. It causes missed opportunities.

It also impacts your culture. It breeds a lack of trust in the organization and it creates real silos in the organization. It means you have great ideas, but you have no real ability to execute on it. For some, it creates a 9 to 5 mentality because the only thing that they’re really accountable for is getting to work on time. For others who take real ownership, it creates the opposite: a never-ending day, where they're trying to make up for what other people aren't getting done. At the end of the day, this just causes stress, burnout, frustration, lack of growth (individual and company), lack of fulfillment. This also causes an inability to have the real impact you want to have on yourself, your family, your team, and your community.

It's not because leaders aren't strong enough or they're unwilling or they're afraid to hold people accountable. It's that they don't have a framework and a process, and it starts with a definition. Accountability is different from responsibility. Responsibility could be one person, it could be a thousand people. Responsibility is who's rolling up their sleeves and getting the job done. Accountability is always and only one person. One person is accountable.

There are different types of accountability you need in your framework. There's functional accountability: who's accountable for marketing, who's accountable for sales, who's accountable for finance? Then, there's process accountability that goes across those functions. Those are accountabilities for working in the business. There's also accountabilities for working on the business. True accountability for priorities every year, every quarter to move the business along.

The number one most important part of the framework is a planning and communication rhythm. If you have the right meeting rhythms, the right communication rhythms, as the leader you don't have to hold everyone accountable. People will hold themselves accountable and hold others around the table accountable. If you've got the right daily meetings, weekly meetings, monthly, quarterly, or annual which you're using to not only set those priorities but create an environment where people are held accountable for those priorities.

Now, just putting the meetings in place without the framework is not going to work. You're going to wind up having wasted meetings and people are going to be looking at their watch saying, "when can I get back and get real work done?" On the other hand, if you put accountabilities in place, if you've got functional accountabilities with true measures of what it means to be successful in marketing or successful in sales. If you have process accountabilities, specific accountabilities around priorities, but you don't have the right communication or meeting rhythm in place, those will die on the vine. They will fall flat because you don't have this structure to actually hold people accountable for those accountabilities.

So, my question for you is: when are you going to move forward to put a framework in place to get those results? Where are you right now? Maybe you as a team don't even have an understanding of the difference between accountability and responsibility. So you need to start there. Maybe you get that, but you don't have the right functional accountabilities or process accountabilities or accountabilities for priorities working on the business in place. Maybe you need to start there. Maybe you have those, but you don't have the right planning and communication rhythm in place. You don't have the right daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly annual meetings. Maybe you need to put that in place.

So, where are you? And what's the next step on your journey?