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The Power of Accountability
Leaders must be accountable if they’re to earn respect, and nothing provides that accountability like proven execution of projects that are steeped in quality and delivered on deadline. This chapter provides simple strategies for achieving quality results that improve upon your organizational role and build your workplace reputation.
Excellence Starts with Execution
Accountability starts with results. Without results, you have nothing to be accountable for and no way to prove your effectiveness as a current—or future—leader. Talk is cheap, but results are priceless. That’s because results are a way to prove your potential and provide clear-cut, physical evidence of your excellence.
Execution—not just how fast you get over the finish line, but how well you complete the work—is the method for getting those results.
Companies are getting leaner and leaner, and most of us are getting asked to do more with less, a situation that often lends itself to rushing, incompetence, and the blame game. Don’t fall into the “everybody else is doing shoddy work, so I can too” trap. Getting something across the finish line in a way other than what your customer asked for is not execution. Getting a spreadsheet turned in with bad data because you did not fact-check it—or even spell-check it—is not execution.
Excel beyond expectations by learning to execute effectively. Here’s how:
- Manage your time. The first step to getting over the “do more with less” hurdle is to manage your time more effectively. Often the “less” we’re asked to do “more” with is just that: time. Learning to declutter your schedule, delegate effectively, and streamline your efforts gives you the time you need to execute with excellence.
- Manage your people. This is where being less tactical and more strategic helps you achieve goals more efficiently and effectively. While managing your time, manage your people to ensure that their time is being used effectively.
- Manage your progress. One of the simplest reasons we fall behind or get surprised is simply because the project has gotten away from us. To avoid this, continually measure and monitor where you are along the project continuum to adjust and reframe your timeline.
- Manage your expectations. As your deadline for delivery approaches, take your progress monitoring to the next level and manage your expectations accordingly. If you can meet your deadline with excellence, great. But if you discover you can’t meet your deadline without sacrificing quality—or that delivery of the inferior product could affect the department’s other teams or plans—step up, take responsibility, and either ask for an extension or more resources to deliver quality on time.
As you can see, if you expect your execution to support your leadership capabilities, you must achieve it within your current workload, bandwidth, and time frame. Ben Franklin wrote, “Failure to plan is planning to fail.” Without planning accordingly, your execution will suffer. Successful execution means refusing to settle for subpar work—from yourself or your team.
Stand Up and Say Something
Accountability means owning the results—whatever those results may be. Most of us find accountability easy when things are going well or a project exceeds expectations, but true accountability is about taking ownership even when things go badly.
At its heart, accountability is about standing up and taking ownership. Good, bad, or ugly, the buck stops with you—and you alone. I find it extremely telling that most dictionary definitions of accountability use the word responsibility. Yet, most people don’t want to look bad; as a result, they don’t take accountability or responsibility for their actions.
Personally and professionally, standing up and taking ownership is important. Even if it hurts in the short term, it shows leadership. You can take responsibility not just for what you’ve done right but where you may have made mistakes.
Being accountable for your mistakes is an important part of leadership in business. Not only that, but it’s an important part of being a leader in your personal life. It’s too easy to ignore ethics nowadays by taking shortcuts and laying blame. But the fact is, careful eyes are always watching and good people like to work with other good people.
Throughout my career, I’ve learned that people forgive mistakes but they won’t forget when you blamed those mistakes on someone else. Even if you’re leading a team and the mistake was made by someone on your team, take accountability for the overall issue and own up to your responsibilities as team leader. Not only will it make the team better, but it will make you a better leader as well.
Profile in Confidence:
Natalye Paquin, Chief Executive Officer, Girl Scouts of Eastern Pennsylvania
There are a couple of things that we can do to help our girls build confidence. We can reward our girls a little differently, and push them a little more to self-select. Girls don’t raise their hands after a particular age. They’ll do it if you say, “Oh, Jennifer, you should try this. You’d be really good at it.” Or “Meghan,” or, you know, “Shauna, you’d be really good at it.” And then when they do it, they knock it out of the park, but they don’t self-select. So this plays itself out when girls and boys get in the workplace asking for money, right?
We praise our girls for good work, and we pay our boys for good work. So if little Susie is making up her bed and cleaning her room, we say, “Susie, that’s so great. Your room looks so pretty.” Now she feels happy about that praise.
Whereas Johnny who just raked the leaves, you don’t just say, “Johnny, wow, the yard looks great.” You say, “Hey, it looks great. Here’s a quarter,” or “Here’s a dollar,” or “Here’s something.” Or he’ll say, “Hey, can I have X, and you give it to him. Girls usually, again, they don’t self-select, so they don’t ask for money because socially, we’re not taught it is proper or polite. Whereas, the boys are totally fine with asking for compensation.
So then, what happens in the workplace is that women respond to positive feedback, because, “Hey, they said I was doing good. But they’re not paying me, but, you know, they’re giving me this positive feedback.” Whereas, a guy, they don’t care about positive feedback. It’s like, “Yeah, that’s fine. I have a family to take care of. And how am I going to get paid?” So, I would say that with girls and boys, we need to pay our girls and we need to praise our boys.
I had a goddaughter who, at 15, said she was going to keep an eye on somebody else’s baby. And she was, like, “Oh, but this baby’s so cute, I’ll babysit for free.” And I stopped her and said, “No, Arianna, you will not sit for free.” And she’s like, “But she’s so cute. I really like her.” I was, like, “No. That is work. You will decide, on an hourly basis, what is the value of your time. How much do you think you can make in an hour? And they’re going to pay you for sitting for that cute little baby.” Getting girls to self-select and paying them for doing something well is extremely important. Not just praising them for doing something well.
This helps us realize that it’s okay to be compensated for doing something well. It doesn’t feel bad, like, “Oh, should I take this $5?” Yeah, you should. You earned it.
The Takeaway
We all know what it’s like when someone in a leadership position, or even a fellow team member, throws us under the bus. Don’t be that leader or team member; don’t be that person. Great leaders take ownership of their work as well as their team’s, and they apologize for not meeting their deadlines, for not getting the numbers right, for falling short of the mark.
Saying you are sorry is an important part of accountability and being proactive about the problem, as well as minimizing any surprises for your bosses and customers as soon as possible.