What is Active Accountability?
Team members feel a strong sense of responsibility for both their personal and the team's behaviors and outcomes and hold their teammates, including their leader, to this same high standard.
Establishing active accountability is a critical factor for achieving your team's mission and objectives and becoming the healthy, high-performing team you want it to be. Use these 5 steps to launch your team toward a culture of high accountability:
Establish clear goals and expectations for the team, and make sure that these are communicated effectively. This involves setting specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals for the team and making sure that each team member understands their roles and responsibilities in achieving them.
Tip: Use Teaming's Team Goals and Key Results to define and track the team's objectives. Assign responsibility for Key Results to team members so that everyone knows who is responsible for each aspect required to achieve each goal. Dedicate time in each team meeting to review and discuss progress to ensure that the team is on a path to achieving its goals and that team members are taking responsibility for their part.
Hold team members accountable for their actions and performance. This will involve setting regular check-ins and progress reviews, providing regular feedback, and holding team members accountable for meeting their goals and expectations.
Tip: Establish a regular cadence within your 1:1 meetings with team members to focus on their performance against expectations and provide coaching and feedback to help the individual maintain and exceed the levels required to be a value-adding member of the team.
Provide team members with the necessary resources and support to help them succeed. This may involve providing training, coaching, or additional support from other team members to ensure that team members have the tools, skills, and information they need to do their jobs effectively.
Tip: Holding team members accountable for unrealistic expectations will result in undue stress and eventual disengagement. Your responsibility as a leader is to ensure that each team member is set up to succeed. Dedicate time in your 1:1s to discuss and understand the areas that might prevent the team member's from achieving the expectations placed upon them. Use Teaming's 1:1 Goals and Key Results to define and track a path to get them to where they need to be.
Cultivate a culture of active accountability by acknowledging and rewarding team members who demonstrate positive examples of active accountability and most importantly, by demonstrating these characteristics yourself.
Tip: Use Teaming's work style guidance to understand how individual team members prefer to receive recognition and acknowledgment.
Actively seek feedback and suggestions from team members, and be willing to adjust your approach to creating accountability based on their input and experiences.
Tip: Use the Get Feedback template from Teaming's 1:1 Template Library to facilitate feedback sessions that elicit feedback on how you can improve your actions to create a strong foundation of active accountability within your team.
By taking these steps, you can help create a solid foundation of active accountability within your team.