This is a guest post by Jack McGuinness of Relationship Impact.
Reenergizing your leadership can have a massive impact on your entire organization. In his final post in the series, Jack McGuinness tackles the topic of accountability.
The business dictionary defines accountability as “the obligation of an individual or organization to account for its activities, accept responsibility for them, and disclose the results in a transparent manner.” Inherent in this definition are three levels of accountability – power, individual and team accountability.
We believe that all three are important in building a great leadership team and a recent HBR article supports our assertion. The article breaks down team performance as follows – in the weakest teams, there is no accountability; in mediocre teams, bosses are the source of accountability; and in high performance teams, peers manage the vast majority of performance problems with one another.
For many leadership teams this last level of accountability where peers hold each other accountable presents a significant challenge. In his bestselling book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni had the following to say about accountability – “Once we achieve clarity and buy-in, it is then that we have to hold each other accountable for what we sign up to do, for high standards and behavior. And as simple as that sounds, most executives hate to do it, especially when it comes to a peer’s behavior.”
Not surprisingly, there is a strong relationship among the three tips we are presenting in this blog post series. Specifically, leadership teams require a purpose to be accountable to and the skill of engaging in productive dialogue (including giving and receiving feedback) is instrumental to a team’s ability to hold each other accountable. The following are a few steps for helping leadership teams move from poor or mediocre accountability to an environment where a healthy balance exists between individual, power and peer accountability:
- To start, the formal leader needs to clarify and reinforce the importance of the three levels of accountability. Most importantly, the leader must model the behaviors she expects for the team. This includes receiving feedback well and providing timely, direct and respectful feedback. She also needs to clarify that the leader’s role does not exist to settle problems or constantly monitor the team; rather it is focused on creating an environment where peers address concerns immediately, directly and respectfully with each other.
- Next, the leadership team needs to focus on its unique purpose and gain agreement on specific individual and collective accountabilities for decisions and actions required to achieve the purpose. Most importantly, the leadership team needs to take action and demonstrate its ability to effectively perform and adjust course as required.
- Periodically the leadership team should to step back and reflect on progress from two perspectives – what results is the team achieving and how is the team achieving the results. In our experience, reflecting on tangible business issues is the most effective mechanism for addressing a leadership team’s ability to engage in productive dialogue and hold each other accountable directly and respectfully.
Truly great leadership teams are resilient and have the capacity to reenergize and get back in sync after inevitable periods of dysfunction. Team members of great leadership teams recognize that they serve as stewards of their organizations supporting a unique enterprise-wide purpose. Great leadership teams also do the hard work necessary to engage in productive dialogue and hold each other to high performance and behavior.
This post originally appeared at ChiefExecutive.net at https://chiefexecutive.net/tips-reenergizing-leadership-team and was reprinted with permission.
