Three Mistakes that Undermine Accountability on Teams

A culture of accountability is something that is missing from many teams. Balls drop and no one notices. When team members do notice, there often isn't enough trust and a mechanism for calling out the gap in a productive way.

trust and clarity are a must when it comes to accountability.

Here are some straightforward ways to bring more accountability to your team.

not devoting enough time on clarity and action items

Dedicate time at the end of your meetings to review who said they'd do what, by when. This is when leaders can clarify the murkiness of unclear actions with loose commitment. You cannot just talk about the work up until the time you need to go to your next meeting. You have to transition to closure, and part of that is giving time to review who will do what before you meet again.

Commitments aren’t written down in a community forum

Sure, you see the individual look like they're scribbling something in a notebook, but for team accountability everyone's commitments should get written down in the same place, in real time, for all to see. (I've written about shared displays before, here).

Having a real-time shared display in the group forum is an important part of accountability because it serves as a visual check-and-balance system. The team can see whether the person taking the action understands it in the same way. 

there’s no accounting ritual

There needs to be discipline in teams to review old action items and follow up on whether they've been done. Reviewing action items can be an awkward thing for a leader to do with their team because it might get misconstrued as micromanaging or it might look like distrust. That said, if the leader can incorporate the ritual of reviewing where the team is with its commitments as part of a standard agenda, that can help take the potential charge out of the accounting process. It's just part of what the team does on a regular basis. The social peer pressure of the group forum when checking in on action items can provide positive incentive for team members to follow through on commitments. 

Be careful though - the point of accountability is to build trust and maintain a high-performance culture. The team is a forum for learning and development, and sometimes when action items aren’t done, it’s a sign of something worth taking a closer look at. For example, a team member could have a hunch that the wrong problem is being solved and their resistance with taking action is the clue. Or, the team member misunderstands priorities or simply doesn’t have bandwidth. So as the leader, try to maintain a tone of understanding and learning from, not of wrist-slapping and shaming.

There you have it - three common omissions leaders make that, when flipped around, are obvious-sounding but far under-employed best practices for building more accountability on your team.

As you attempt to implement these tips to overcome the status quo, you can be explicit about the reasoning with your team. The leader could say to their team: "We are going to transition now, with 15 minutes left, to review what we have just agreed to do before next week’s meeting. I know this is new for us, but I think it'll be a helpful routine so we leave here knowing exactly who is doing what." 

Design time in your following meeting to review where everyone is with previous commitments, or better yet, design a shared process for indicating that items have been completed.

This isn't a new concept. The important thing, ultimately, is that YOU are LEADING the team in explicitly attending to its accountability mechanisms.