How to Increase Accountability in Your Culture

Increase Accountability in Your Culture to Set the Stage for High Performance
Do you know how to increase accountability in your culture?  The best leaders make balancing organizational health and accountability a cultural priority.  To keep pace, companies need to consistently perform at higher levels — and they cannot afford to miss the mark.

What Higher Performance Means
For leaders, this means bigger goals, increased complexity, and tighter budgets.  For employees, this means higher expectations, an increased pace of change, and the need to do more with less.

Companies are Not Firing On All Cylinders
When we assess organizational culture, we find that organizations are not performing at their peak because their leaders have not made company-wide accountability a priority.  Other research backs this up:

• A Workplace Accountability Study reported that 82% of respondents said they have limited to no ability to hold others accountable to do what they said they would do.
• A CEO Benchmarking Report found that CEOs rated “holding people accountable” and “letting go of underperformers” as their two biggest weakness.
• Gallup reported that only 14% of employees feel their performance is managed in a way that inspires them to take more responsibility at work.

Without high levels of accountability, it is hard for leaders to set the stage for consistently high performance — especially when the stakes are high.

Two Phases to Increase Accountability in Your Culture
There are, fundamentally, two phases to building a high performing culture with high levels of transparency and accountability:

1. Phase 1: Set Clear Performance Expectations
   In order to perform the right tasks in the right way, employees need to be clear about exactly what is expected of them.  Clear performance expectations help to make sure employees focus on DOING the activities that align with the overall company strategy and BEHAVING in a way that aligns with cultural standards.
2. Phase 2: Establish a Fair and Transparent System of Accountability
   The only way to ensure that performance expectations are met regularly in a way that makes sense is to set up a company-wide system that accurately exposes where people stand relative to performance expectations.  The best systems are fair, timely, accurate, meaningful, consistent, proportionate, and relevant.

Four Attributes to Increase Accountability in Your Culture
To increase accountability in your culture, focus on getting the following attributes right:

• The Critical Few Objectives
  If you set up too many goals, you risk confusion, overlap, and a loss of focus. Identify no more than three core objectives at each level.  Each employee should know how what they do contributes to the team goals and, ultimately, to the company goals.

  To be effective, the objectives should be achievable with challenging, but reasonable, effort.

• The Means to the End
  It is the leaders’ job to be sure that employees have the means to achieve the desired end results.  Identify the specific resources and capabilities needed for success along with the major obstacles you need to overcome across different levels of the organization.   This can include customized training, access to special expertise, additional funding, more personnel and, above all, the leaders’ unwavering support.
• Tracking and Sharing Accountability
  Teams need to hold frequent meetings to track progress and share lessons learned. Results should be transparent to all.  When there is an issue, the whole team should work together to figure out what is going wrong and how to fix it.
• Consequences
  From the get-go, employees need to understand that they will be both rewarded for and held accountable for results. If there is substandard performance, leaders need to take action — either to provide additional support or, after a reasonable trial period, let the poor performer go.  If there is outstanding performance, leaders should proportionately reward their accomplishments.

The Bottom Line
To increase accountability in your culture, start by building an environment grounded in trust, ownership, and continuous learning. Accountability flourishes when employees feel safe to take responsibility, learn from mistakes, and follow through on their promises. It takes deliberate effort and sustained leadership commitment — but the payoff is a stronger, more reliable, and higher-performing organization.

To learn more about how to increase accountability in your culture to increase performance, download The 3 Levels of a High Performance Culture that Leaders Must Get Right