A Five-Step Recipe For Strengthening Accountability In Your Culture

By Peter DeMarco | February 26, 2019

As a CEO, how many times have you scanned the room and asked, “Who is going to be accountable for this problem?” After an intense lingering silence, no one responds, and no one steps forward.

Accountability means accepting responsibility for one’s choices and actions. When things go wrong, this necessary quality of teamwork is often in short supply.

Strengthening accountability in an organization’s culture is like baking bread, and you are the leader — the chief baker. To get the right results, you must use the proper ingredients, prepare them in the right order and then bake at the right temperature for the right length of time.

Try this five-step recipe for baking accountability into your culture so that your employees have the following:

1. The Qualification to Act

A successful recipe begins by making sure all the ingredients are present. The same approach applies to understanding if you have the necessary parts in place for accountability.

Let’s say you’re head of a bakery. Your bakery hires an employee to inspect loaves coming off the line. Eager to please, but untrained and lacking experience, the new employee mistakenly allows an undercooked batch to be bagged and packed. Because the bad bread would have shipped to a real customer, the supervisor holds the new employee accountable.

Is this response appropriate? No, it is unjust. Wise leaders understand that employees can only be held accountable for what they are capable of performing.

Structure your employee-readiness rating system into three levels: trained, experienced and certified. “Trained” means that you’ve given the employee the proper knowledge and they’ve retained it. “Experienced” means the employee has spent time applying the knowledge on the job. And “certified” means the employee can habitually perform the work in the timeframe required.

2. The Freedom to Act

We tend to praise or blame people based on the choices they make freely. Ensuring employees have the freedom to act is activated by the first step, making sure they’re qualified to act.

Let’s return to your bakery floor. A qualified employee is about to reject over-cooked loaves. But, because the product is already late, the supervisor overrules the employee and tells him to ship it anyway. The employee objects, but to no avail. This employee is qualified to make the right choice, but not permitted to make the right choice.

Your employees’ willingness to be held accountable for a good choice increases or decreases in proportion to their freedom to act. Leaders must capitalize on this principle by being good educators. Improve your employees’ freedom to choose by teaching them what constitutes the standards of excellence for their choices and providing alternative channels of communication when someone promotes or pressures them to make a wrong choice. Remember, a leader’s power multiplies through followers doing the good they have been taught.

3. The Authority to Act

An employee may be well-qualified to act and may have the freedom to act, but he or she is not in a position of authority to act. If you want a whole organization to move toward its aim, you need to allow employees the time and space to achieve. In other words, let the yeast work so the dough can rise.

Find out why your employees are not making the decisions they ought to be making. Do your employees have the authority to correct others’ failure (regardless of rank) to follow proper procedures and make the right choice? Make sure the authority to act is also designed right into the employee’s job, supported by clear organizational boundaries and structure.

4. The Tools to Act

Far too many leaders fail to hold their teams accountable for taking care of the tools they need to do their jobs well. The fourth step, providing people with the tools to act, depends on the principle of due care. A bakery is not like a home kitchen. Equipment like mixers, oven, conveyors, racks, etc. provide the capacity to activate the qualifications, choices and authority delegated to employees so they can do their jobs effectively and efficiently.

Make it a point on a regular basis to inspect the condition of your company’s equipment and technology. Increasing your team’s sense of accountability requires the leader to show followers the importance of maintaining the tools essential to achieving the organization’s aim.

5. The Leadership to Act

The fifth and final step provides the unifying principle for baking accountability into your culture. The leader’s energy — the heat — brings the parts into a single harmonized whole. Just as the baking process yields a single loaf of tasty bread from a multitude of ingredients, so effective leaders bring their employees’ talents and abilities together as a single cooperative group.

Leaders who understand their organization’s true aim are constantly subdividing and delegating their authority to qualified people, yet these leaders never forget that ultimate responsibility resides at the top. Remember, the primary source of heat is the leader’s willingness to set, communicate and exemplify clear standards and measures required to achieve the aim. Heat inspires employees to act and use their powers to do good work.

Now, let’s go back to my opening narrative. Rather than struggling to understand the lack of response from your team, instead, you have applied the accountability recipe to your bakery. See how the silence scatters. Observe as those gathered self-report their performance misses or contributions to the problem. Notice how your team is seeking to solve the problem rather than fix the blame. Best of all, you — the leader —are finally free to focus your time on all those issues you’re responsible for deciding and doing!

That’s the five-step recipe for strengthening accountability in your culture. Remember, you can’t make dough (money) without the right recipe for baking the bread!

Originally Uploaded on: Forbes