How do you hold members of your team accountable? Weekly check-ins, structured performance reports, monitor daily behavior, recording every website they visited?
Having to hold people accountable if you don’t know the way is tricky. In my opinion, if I have to hold you accountable to do your job, we’re not going to work together for very long. But consider this:
Playing the Game of Accountability
Growing up I played many different sports with various levels of skill. Regardless of sport or skill level, the competitive “will to win” was foundational to my reason for playing, and in order to win a score must be kept.
During general practice, where we didn’t keep score, I would find myself thinking of what I was going to do after practice, on the weekend, semi detached from the task at hand. Near the end of practice we would often have an inter-team scrimmage where we kept score amongst ourselves. My level of focus and drive to perform at a high level was consciously, substantially higher.
During actual games, where we not only kept score but made it public to anyone who was watching us, I was hyper-focused on doing my best to help my team win. I was compelled to perform to the best of my capabilities so I didn’t let my team members down and suffer personal embarrassment.
Nurturing Healthy Competition
Competitiveness is natural in the business world as well. If everyone is working in silos, doing their thing on their time and nobody is paying close attention to the tasks at hand, work is typically completed with less than optimal results.
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Throw personal deadlines and formal production requirements into the mix, shared only between a few people, and results typically improve. Take everyone’s deadlines and other production goals and put them in a place where everyone can see not only their results, but how they compare against each other, and you create a whole new level of self driven accountability.
Think about how you can create a very simple, public ‘scoreboard’ that displays people and their goals within your business and watch their innate competitiveness drive better results, without having to continuously, personally hold them accountable.
What have you found successful in the accountability department?
