How to foster greater Team Accountability
To be effective at fostering team accountability and ownership, an organisation's systems and processes must be designed with
three basic principles in mind: focus, influence, and consequences.
FOCUS - Systems for accountability begin with clear focus and expectations. In a team setting, teams need to share a clear
mission statement that links directly to the organisation's vision. Building on that mission statement a team should identify its
collective outputs and devise systems for measuring their success at efficiently delivering quality products or services. Within the
team, each member should be clear of his or her roles and responsibilities including agreements on individual expectations and
standards of excellence.
Strategies for ensuring focus:
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Clearly communicate and continually reinforce the organisation's mission and vision.
Require teams to explicitly describe their purpose and outputs that link to the organisation's vision.
Assure that teams complete a whole piece of work.
Have teams explicitly define each member's role and responsibilities.
Have teams establish clear standards of excellence for members.
Have teams track and analyze their own performance data.
Encourage teams to conduct regular business planning sessions.
INFLUENCE - Teams will also need to be able to influence the operations of these systems. This means they need to be given as
much authority as is reasonable to determine how they achieve the outcomes they have committed to. As Stephen Covey says,
"You can't hold people accountable for results if you manage their methods."
Similarly, team members need to have influence over those with whom they are interdependent. Holding teams jointly accountable
for their combined results will only work if the people within the team can influence each other's behaviour. Ideally this implies team
members have what we call "gate control" or control over who joins the team and who stays on the team. At the very least, systems
need to be devised such that a team member's feedback carries as much weight as a manager's feedback. This can be affected by
instituting a team review process or at least by factoring into the performance appraisal system input from customers and
teammates.
Strategies for ensuring influence:
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Allow employees to participate in the shaping of the organisation's mission and vision.
Teach teams to use performance feedback as the basis for meeting and problem solving sessions.
Encourage teams to analyse work practices for improvement.
Allow teams to act on their improvement ideas.
Give teams choice of vendors.
Give teams budget authority.
Ensure that team members regularly give feedback to one another.
Empower teams to select new members.
Empower teams to remove non-performers.
CONSEQUENCES - Lastly, an organisation's systems need to close the loop by connecting real consequences to a team's actions.
Too often managers shield teams from the consequences of what they do. They field complaints from customers or run interference
with other departments. If a team is to be held accountable, then they must handle the results of their own actions together. This
usually means putting teams in regular contact with their customers, and linking at least a portion of their reward with their
cumulative efforts. It also means the whole team is held accountable for the performance of each member. In a team based
organization, coaching and correcting individual performance problems is as much a team responsibility as a management
responsibility.
Strategies for ensuring consequences:
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Ensure that tems get direct and regular feedback from customers.
Let teams carry over savings in their budgets.
Abolish internal monopolies.
Tie rewards and compensation to team output.
Allow teams to share in the financial success of the organization.
A Culture of Team Accountability
While less easy to identify, an organisation's culture is just as powerful as its systems in determining how much accountability
people will accept. While changing an organisation's culture is more difficult than tinkering with its systems, changing the systems
without addressing the cultural aspects could be a waste of time.
Creating a culture of accountability means developing a climate in which people can speak openly, admit to mistakes without fear,
and worry more about serving the customer than looking better than a co-worker. There are several cultural dimensions that can
contribute to or discourage accountability.
The biggest fear people have about accountability is that they will be punished for their actions. Savvy organizations realize that
blaming people for events that have already occurred does more harm than good. It tends to make people secretive about their
actions and competitive with their co-workers. Workers end up looking out for "number one" more than for the success of the
organization.
In successfully accountable organizations, mistakes are celebrated as learning opportunities. The focus is shifted from finger
pointing to jointly figuring out how things should be done differently in the future. One example of how this might be achieved is the
team that began each of its weekly meetings with a celebration of the week's biggest ‘screw-up’. This technique not only effectively
surfaced problems and got them solved; it virtually drove fear out of the workplace.
Changing from a culture of blame to one of honest and trusting problem solving usually boils down to the way each of us behaves
with each other.
Use the list of strategies below to help your leaders and teammates foster a culture of shared accountability.
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Earn the trust of your co-workers. This means doing what you say and saying what you mean all the time.
Publicly own up to your own mistakes and accept the natural consequences for them.
When mistakes or problems occur, focus on the future. To correct the problem and prevent it from happening again,
steer the discussion to what needs to be done next and away from what was done.
Remember that intent is not the same as performance. Help people follow through on their commitments by regularly
checking in on progress. This needn't take on a "Big Brother" air. Simply make old business or ongoing projects a regular
agenda item and ask people to share their current status, successes, and need for help.
Be explicit about accountability and expectations. Talk openly (and preferably face-to-face) about responsibilities,
performance standards, deadlines, potential consequences or implications of their actions, etc.
Be supportive. Help people talk about their progress on their commitments, and offer help when they are stuck or unsure.
Source:Marsha Willard and Darcy Hitchcock