Accountability is something that company leaders have been engaging with what it and how to achieve it effectively. It makes the employees flinch as it is among the most misunderstood or poorly defined words. Very few managers manage to hold employees accountable for their work successfully.
It is one of the top development needs. From the employees perspective, they feel that their performance is rarely managed in a way that motivates them. Most of them feel that managers are not objective in their evaluation and most feel they are not working to their full potential.
The basic problem is that accountability involves more than mere accounting. The quantitative factor associated with this process results in instinctively search for shortfalls, results is categorisation, and ranking against peers.
These processes can be both formal and informal, where the team leaders assess contributions made and improvements they can make. It can be an annual review or a regular monthly meeting. Leaders can make the employees feel that their work is honoured and recommend areas they can improve.
Companies must dramatically redefine what it means. There are three major changes leaders need to make to ensure that employees feel appreciated and at the same time challenge them to achieve more.
Make dignity the foundation
Managers must understand the impact of their assessments. Leaders should believe their role is to create conditions in which people do their best and enjoy doing it. This would lead to
- Better connections between leaders and employees: Regular monthly meetings must have a sense of purpose and induce employees to share their sense of achievements and problems they faced.
- The quality of feedback and learning improves: When feedback is shared without degrading the work done, the quality of feedback improves. When employees genuinely feel that their leaders are focussed in their success they are less guarded about sharing their experiences. They will also be more receptive to feedback and coaching to improving skills or adding new skills.
Focus on being fair
When the evaluation is seen as fair, employees are much more likely, to be honest, act fairly with others. Fairness should be made a priority. This connects the employee and his contributions.
Especially in a knowledge economy of today, people's ideas, creativity are direct reflections of their work and hence the evaluation of work must be done in conjunction with their work. Evaluations would be seen as fair when leaders acknowledge the work done as a result of the talents of the employees.
It would also remove the biases implicit in evaluation systems. It would reveal if there is equitable opportunity to succeed irrespective of one's ability and enable leaders to help people to succeed with whatever talents they have.
The best way would be to allow employees to define the standards to which they will be held, leads to better accountability. They are more motivated to reach it and often exceed it.
Make restoration the goal, not blame.
People fear accountability as they are often left with a feeling of shame and harshness. The immediate response is to hide mistakes and point fingers elsewhere.
To rectify the mistakes made requires the leader to have humility and patience. They must understand that a person's success is more than the sum of any single assignment. Leaders should also realise they have a role in their people's failure.
The goal should be to make accountability a welcome exercise yielding fair, actionable feedback and induce employees to improve their performance and contribute more.
How to Actually Encourage Employee Accountability
by Ron Carucci HBR 2020/11
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