Have you ever been in a situation as a leader, where you’ve planned to make progress on a project in a meeting with your team, only to check back in a couple of weeks later and find out that no real progress has been made?
Or maybe you’ve been in a situation where you’ve fallen short of a target that’s set for your team, and no one apart from you really seems to care?
As a manager both of these situations are frustrating but also incredibly normal.
Often the common denominator in situations like this is a lack of ownership and accountability.
So what can we do to create this sense of accountability team-wide and set the organisation up for success?
Before you can hold your team accountable for specific cultural expectations, it’s absolutely critical that you ensure they understand where your organisation is going and what’s expected of them.
We break this down into 5 different layers:
1. Purpose & Cause
Are your people clear about the purpose and cause? Do they understand why you exist as an organisation?
2. Vision & Commitment
What’s the vision or the commitment of the organisation? What’s the number one thing you need to do in order to achieve that purpose?
3. Values
Are your team aware of not only the values in a broad sense, but do they understand how these translate into day-to-day performance and interactions with the team and customers?
4. Strategic Priorities
Are your team clear on the strategic priorities of the business and how they personally contribute to achieving those strategic priorities?
5. Organisation Foundations
Do your team understand the things that make the company unique and underpin its success?
If you are able to communicate these 5 elements effectively, the end result should be a sense of clarity, ownership and focus amongst your team.
However while the pathway may now be there to follow this alone is not enough, which is why embedding a culture of accountability is so important.
We break accountability down into 4 different foundational elements… ultimately if you can ensure these 4 paradigms exist within your organisation you should start to notice improvements in team performance and overall cultural alignment.
The 4 foundations to success that hold people accountable to delivering are:
- Rules and expectations
- Inspect what we expect
- Consequences
- Consistency
In this video we’ll dive into each of these foundations in more detail, and explain how you can apply them within your team.
