The Accountability Myth

I frequently hear leaders talk about the difficulty of holding their people accountable. Holding someone accountable is an elusive goal. Even if you can hold someone accountable in any given moment, who has the time, energy and bandwidth to hold someone else accountable on an on-going basis? The only person you can effectively hold accountable is yourself. So…let’s approach accountability from an entirely different angle.

What if I asked you how you would like to contribute to our overall goal or mission? Once you had clearly stated how you would like to make a difference, I then asked you how you thought you could do exactly that? I then asked you to layout a detailed plan with milestones along the way to success and then schedule a series of follow up meetings so that you could keep me posted on your progress. Now given this type of conversation, how likely is it that I will need to hold you accountable – very unlikely. Stop trying to hold people accountable and instead create an environment that allows them to hold themselves accountable.

If you would like some help applying this concept, let’s talk.