Do Your Team Members Hold Each Other Accountable?

Leader-to-Report and Peer-to-Peer accountability keep you on track.

Do your team members hold each other accountable?

When you create structures for accountability, both leader-to-team member and peer-to-peer accountability improves. Everyone understands what is expected of them, and exactly how success is defined across the company.

Accountability is how you keep your business or team on track. It lets you speed up without capsizing, because you know each player is giving their all and rowing with the team. You turbo-charge your business, achieving goals that would be impossible otherwise.

You empower your team and move forward together when you embrace individual, peer-to-peer, and even customer accountability.

Create Transparency

How can people stay accountable if they don’t know what’s expected of them? Ask yourself: do your team members understand what their responsibilities are—and just as importantly, what is not their responsibility?

Managers and team members enforce accountability by having visibility into everyone’s individual business plans. They should be able to see how each team member is tracking towards their goals, and what progress is being made. (If your organization doesn’t have individual business plans, check out my future blogs and learn how to create one!)

It’s up to leadership to make sure your team is focused on the things they claim ownership for, and that they’re claiming ownership of the right things. But everyone should have visibility into those roles, so they can keep each other accountable, too.

When you do that, you support the whole company achieving its larger goals and mission.

At Bird Rock Systems, we update roles and responsibilities on an annual basis as the business has consistently grown. That way, we avoid bottlenecks where team members aren’t sure who to go to in order to get things done. More importantly, it’s a mechanism for team accountability.

Customer Accountability

Accountability doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Everything that you apply to your team also needs to extend to your customers. You have to be accountable to the promises you’ve made to them. To do that, you need a solid handle on your targets and a way to measure your progress.

As Bird Rock Systems scaled, we found that we needed better insights and processes so that our successes were repeatable, even though every solution we offered was essentially a custom playing field. We're very customer-oriented in how we deliver our service, which is one of our differentiators, but it means that every single conversation is a new deal. It’s a new product, a new service, new everything.

Our Sales team started creating custom business plans for top customers. Each plan, which includes the customers’ goals, strategies and initiatives, helps track how we are doing and whether we are going to hit sales promises and other services metrics. Being able to hold ourselves accountable to every customer, every time, means we can guarantee our work will be of a quality we can be proud of.

Foster Accountability

Here are some strategies you can use to foster accountability in your team.

• Empower your team: When your people are held accountable, they are empowered to push and improve on existing standards and practices. That fosters a workplace where people continually improve on processes and make the whole business stronger.
• Accountability Check-ins: Keep up with progress by having regular one-on-ones with every team member at least once a month. That gives you time to respond proactively instead of reactively to any challenges you find.
• Reward Accountability: Celebration and rewards should be linked to performance. Team celebrations help everyone share the stakes of a goal, and take accountability for whether it succeeds or fails.

Contact us now if you want to know more about how The Turbo Playbook fosters accountability. I can coach your team to make sure everyone knows what’s expected of them, and how to hit their targets.