You and Your Employee: Be Accountable
by Kay Stroman, The Stroman Group
One of the responsibilities a leader has is to hold their employees accountable to performance, behavior and goal expectations. It is true, this doesn’t always happen consistently or even appropriately with some leaders. Why is that?
My theory on why leaders are not always good or fair at holding employees accountable, if they ever do, is that they, themselves are not personally accountable!
Lack of personal accountability as a leader can look like this:
Joe Leader establishes unrealistic budget target without input from the team. Budget is blown. The team gets blamed.
Jill Leader delegates a key project deliverable to one of the team members and never follows up. The deliverable isn’t completed. The team member takes the fall.
Joe Leader’s team exceeds their goals for the year. Joe Leader takes all the credit.
Jill Leader assumes responsibility for a key project deliverable and doesn’t deliver, which results in the delay of project completion. She is confronted by her superior on why this occurred. Jill Leader throws her employees under the bus.
Any of these sound familiar? They should. They happen all the time as a result of insufficient personal accountability.
As a leader, you earn the right to hold others accountable by first being accountable. Contrary to popular belief, your title or level of position in the organization does not inherently give you the right to only hold others accountable while you sit at your command center and cast blame on others. Make no mistake about it, only your actions give you that right!
It takes authenticity and vulnerability to be a leader who can say some of the following things that demonstrate personal accountability.
Mea Culpa – my bad, my mistake – I should have consulted you on the budget. Had I done that we wouldn’t be in this predicament.
While Sally Sue didn’t deliver what was delegated to her, I should have followed up. This one is on me.
All the credit for hitting our goals this year goes to the team. I certainly couldn’t do it on my own!
I apologize for dropping the ball on my project deliverable. I should have let you know it would be delayed or asked for help.
You may think that some of the above statements may be a sign of weakness. On the contrary, it takes a strong leader, a leader with, well… integrity, to be personally accountable.Consider this old saying by Louis Nizer… “When a man points a finger at someone else, he should remember that four of his fingers are pointing at himself.” Try it! What it means is that before you cast blame on others, deflect criticism onto others or even take credit for what others have done, first make sure your own house is in order. What part did you play in the success or failure of the outcome? Be honest about it.When your employees see you demonstrate personal accountability by doing what you say your going to do, following up, or taking the hit when it needs to be taken, you are guarding your integrity and creating connectivity with your employees.