Steps to a sustainable business
BY JAY PERRY
There are a lot of elements involved in practicing accountability. Ultimately, accountability boils down to communications. Information sharing within communications in an accountability framework. It takes an objective position and puts focus onto the facts. We must have an evaluative approach to have success in holding people to account.
This evaluative approach helps everything else to become much easier and helps us work smarter, not harder. Sustainability is a key benefit to learning how to put accountability into action. When practicing accountability all day, every day we build the team’s abilities in leadership, problem solving, cooperation and collaboration. These are the steps that lead to a sustainable business. Without these, a company is doomed to premature failure.
The very first step in accountability in action is clarity. Assumption often creeps into conversations and people leave with misguided ideas as to what is being done, who is going to do it, when is to be completed and—most importantly—why we are doing it. If you keep those four Ws—what, who, when and what—at the top of your thoughts when you practice accountability, you will eliminate assumptions thus getting everyone on the same page. Use them as a checklist to conclude any conversations with the team. Once you have achieved this level of clarity in the communications piece, it is time for action.
After that we want to evaluate what actually happened. This is where the ‘audit’ mindset helps. When we just look at the facts of what happened it reduces the emotional tensions around the process of accountability in action. This evaluative mindset is examining facts do not excuse or reasons for why something didn’t work out the way we thought it would. We are not playing the “blame game.” Another point to keep in mind is that accountability must be practiced every day, all day. That means you will evaluate things that did go right too!
This is an important factor in taking any negativity out of our approach to accountability. When we can acknowledge when things have gone right, we reinforce a positive message about how we want things to run. This helps the team learn how they should be thinking, appeals to their sense of fairness and often gives them courage to become more engaged and actively support the leader in getting to the goal. Think about your own experience in being recognized in a balanced way—acknowledged for doing something correctly and guidance when you have been off-track.
The bottom line in accountability in action in practicing it with everything under your roof—the big and the small. It is another way that we can stay the one who’s driving.
