5 Simple Ways to Improve Accountability
Most senior leadership teams struggle with accountability. Here's how to fix the issue and improve productivity quickly.
The lack of accountability on leadership teams is not because you have incapable people or because they lack the right motivation. Most executives I work with are exceptionally skilled with great experience. They are high-driven type-A professionals who are hungry to succeed. The issue in most cases is a lack of the proper frameworks, clear communication, and effective decision-making processes.
Here are the five top fixes for leadership teams struggling with accountability and delivering results consistently. If you're having issues in your company, the solution is likely one or more of these areas of improvement.
1. Develop a clear strategy
Before you can make any sort of progress, you need to know where you want to go. Without a clear set of objectives and decisions on what you want to achieve (and not achieve), you'll spin your wheels. I like to say that you can climb any mountain you want, just not every mountain you want. And if half your team is climbing Everest and the other half K2, you won't get very far.
Make sure you have a strategic plan and a strategic planning process that allows you to collect key insights about your customer and competitors to craft a differentiated position in your market. Find a handful of attributes you'll be known for, and then focus your operations on delivering on those promises. More important, identify all those things you are not going to do so you can focus your time, energy, and money.
2. Get buy-in from senior leaders
Sometimes the problem is not the strategy but rather the commitment to the strategy. I've seen CEOs go off on solo retreats and craft smart strategies only to return to the team and struggle to implement them. Generally, the problem is that the key functional leaders either don't really understand the why behind the strategy or just don't feel ownership of it.
Strategy development should instead be a process that involves key stakeholders with unique insights. Smart, highly driven people want to have input and influence over their work and effort, and including the right people in the process will ensure you're working with the right information. This results in decisions and directions that everyone feels bought into.
3. Have clear role descriptions
It's impossible to win a game if you don't know the rules. Yet, too many executives are in roles that have no clear description of responsibilities or measures of success. This means both that they don't know what they should really focus on, and that nobody else knows what to expect from them. Good, clear role descriptions for everyone on the leadership team means that the boundaries and handoffs between executives are clear and accountable. Further, these must be reviewed and revised as the company grows and evolves. I like to review these roles quarterly and catch any gaps or overlaps quickly, well before they become a problem.
4. Set absolute priorities
A strategy is worthless without a good execution process. You need a system for taking strategies and turning them into sets of actions with timeframes. The challenge often is that there is always a lot to do in a business; usually, far more to do than there is time. To create focus, you need not just a list of priorities but an absolutely prioritized list.
Each quarter I have teams identify the top three strategic priorities for the company for the next 90 days, assigning clear owners for each. Then we have each individual executive identify their personal top three priorities in order of importance.
Everyone knows that they shouldn't work on a lower priority item until they have done everything possible on the higher priorities. Also, if someone is struggling with a key company priority, everyone should drop everything else and help them finish by the end of the quarter.
5. Clarify success criteria
It's impossible to deliver something when you don't know what done looks like. The devil is in the details when it comes to accountability. Creating clear and measurable success criteria is key to driving results. Don't just say "hire a new program manager" by the end of the quarter; clarify if that means they have an offer letter in hand, or if they have accepted an offer, or if they have started their first day. Details matter, and expectations need to be set at the beginning of the time period.
Creating a culture of accountability is not about rewards and punishments. It's about clarity and setting challenging but achievable goals for leaders and managers. It's a muscle that develops and improves over time. The trick is to understand that it's not just about hiring good people. Great companies learn that accountability is a process that can be honed and improved over time.
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