5 Tips on accountability for teams

Accountability is very important in a team setting. Your teammates need to understand that they’re responsible for the team’s success or failure. It starts with each person being very clear on their own roles and deliverables, as well as those across the team.  Here are some tips to help you use accountability in a positive way that will help drive the team’s success. 

1. Accountability starts with the leader

As the leader, you are responsible  for the current and future performance of your team as a whole. Each team member is responsible for their part. It’s a two-way street. Let your teammates know what is expected of them and communicate clearly what is expected from you. You should be working towards common goals and with success clearly defined. Be very clear and specific. That’s how you keep everyone accountable. 

2. Put easy reporting procedures in place

Your teammates need to know how to handle different situations that may come up. For example: what should they do if they think they’re going to be late for a deadline? Well, I remember in my time in the corporate world I had a red, yellow and green highlighting system in a shared Google spreadsheet for all key deliverables. Nothing fancy because at the time the company couldn’t afford project management tools. So people knew that by highlighting each task I had an easy dashboard where I could see the status. I would say “I don’t want to see red highlights the day before a deadline. I rather see a yellow highlight a month before a deadline so that I can see what resources we can use to hit our deadline.” Make it safe for your teammates to bring issues to you as quickly as possible and not hide them until the last minute where no one can do anything. 

3. Communicate performance issues 

Leaders avoid doing this regularly for mainly two reasons, one is they’re worried that they may come across as nit-picking or honestly they don’t have the energy or the training on how to approach performance issues. Failing to inform your teammates on their errors or things that could be done better, is actually unfair to them. You’re basically not letting them grow by learning from their mistakes. The art of course is to do it constructively, in the moment when facts are fresh. This more informal training style goes over better than your team seeing what they did wrong listed in a performance appraisal months later. If your team understands your motivation is their improvement and development, you will actually be respected more as a leader.

4. Remove roadblocks and coach your teammates

Monitor progress and be a resource to your team. What roadblocks can you help to remove so that they can achieve their goal? Listen to them 80% of the time so that you understand where they come from and coach them. In order to coach, you need to know your teammates well and use emotional intelligence. That means you need to know not only your own viewpoints, but see and  empathize with your teammates' viewpoints. When your teammate knows that you’re interested in their story, then coaching can happen because it’s at that moment that she/he feels receptive to coaching. If you don’t know how to coach that is a different story. It’s not uncommon for many leaders. While it’s not your fault that you did not get this training, identify it as a development area for yourself and discuss getting training with your manager. 

5. Celebrate when things go right

We humans have the tendency to focus on the negatives which means in our weekly team meetings there is more air time given  to what has not gone as expected. While it is important to talk about things that went wrong and lessons learned, it is equally important to talk about what went right. Celebrate your teammates and their accomplishments. And don’t wait until a project is completed to do that. Give compliments and encouragements weekly or even daily as you see them achieving things. I used to text my team members when they did something that was good. I also mentioned it in a team meeting but didn’t wait until then to let them know when they did a good job. It could be a presentation they did, how they conducted themselves in a meeting and engaged with others. Encourage, encourage and encourage!!! Celebrate, celebrate and celebrate!!! This does not happen by itself - you as the leader need an active mindset to look for all such opportunities, big and small. 

The bedrock of an effective team is trust. There are many things that help create it. Accountability is key because it provides clarity (of goals) and responsibility (of individuals). This role clarity helps a team be aligned and promotes each team member having each other’s back.