Unleashing your business potential through accountability
Cultivating true accountability is a great way to unleash your business’s potential. If your people take responsibility for their actions and decisions, then it saves an awful lot of time and effort. In many businesses (if not most) people have two jobs. Their first job is the productive work they do, the second job is managing their reputation and perception within the business. If everyone is truly accountable, then that second job is not needed because it’s all out in the open anyway: everyone owns their faults, mistakes and words so everyone can focus on what actually matters rather than spending a load of time managing their reputation.
THE FLIP SIDE OF EMPOWERMENT
Accountability and empowerment are two sides of the same coin. You can’t have one without the other. Most people say they want to be in charge and empowered but, without accountability, no genuine empowerment is possible. For example, if employees are hedging their bets on a decision by “checking with the boss” they are, effectively, pushing that decision making to the boss. They are not talking responsibility for the decision and so we have a kind of fake empowerment. If it goes wrong, it’s actually the boss’s fault as the boss signed off on it.
This is not empowerment and it’s certainly not accountability. In order to engender true empowerment people need to take full responsibility for their decisions. Both good and bad, it’s easy to be accountable for your successes, harder to be accountable for you failure, but both are required if empowerment is to succeed.
“There is no empowerment without accountability”
This can be quite a tough way of working for some. Despite what people say to the contrary, many people actually like being micromanaged because then they are not accountable for anything, Everything is “the boss’s fault”. But if you can get genuine accountability, the productivity boost is amazing. No more effort needs to be wasted managing internal PR or blame storming and all
the drama this creates.
Everyone is just getting on with what needs to be done.
HOW DO WE ENCOURAGE ACCOUNTABILITY?
1. REMOVE THE BLAME CULTURE.
Blame and punishment will destroy accountability. This might seem counter-intuitive. After all, isn’t blaming making people accountable for their mistakes? Well, not really. Blame is negative and all it really does is encourage people to not make decisions or hide their errors. If errors can be dealt with positively and constructively without blame then people can actually learn from their errors.
2. REMOVE HIERARCHIES
Remove hierarchies as much as possible so that employees are unable to pass accountability up to the boss. This can be tough as these behaviours are often engrained and often managers will unwittingly discourage accountability by being helpful. They will solve a problem for their people through kindness, but this is not kind in the long run as it enforces a kind of learned helplessness.
3. LET GO OF POWER
Encourage managers to let go and empower their employees and to not make decisions they don’t need to. Managers will often, with the best intent, make decisions or sign off on things for their people. This is almost always through trying to be helpful rather than by being power hungry and desperate to maintain control. But by signing off on decisions for employees’ managers disempower their people.
CONCLUSIONS AND NEXT STEPS
This article is one in our series on unleashing business potential through people power. We hope you found it useful. Please feel free to share it or, better still, let us know what you think. If you want to know more about how to unleash potential through people power then check out our other articles in the series.
And, if you want to know more about how our third-party logistics service can help you unleash your business potential by taking away all the hassle of logistics then please do give us a call.
UNLEASH YOUR BUSINESS POTENTIAL SERIES
1. CURIOSITY
2. COLLABORATION
3. CREATIVITY
4. CARING / COMPASSION
5. CALMNESS
6. ACCOUNTABILITY