Accountability plays a crucial role in personal growth and organizational success—when it’s done right. Building a culture of accountability with empathy in mind will strengthen any company, while helping employees achieve their highest potential.
What’s more, employees are increasingly interested in working for organizations that prioritize accountability—particularly Millennials and Gen Z workers. However, just 23% of employees say they’ve received meaningful guidance from their boss in the past week, Gallup has found. Lacking clear feedback and direction makes it difficult to remain accountable for achieving goals.
In this article, we explore how to shift into a healthier approach to accountability that catalyzes growth. We’ll address the major rewards of accountability and how to nurture this culture on your team.
Table of Contents
- Redefining Accountability in the Workplace: It’s Not about Blame
- Reaping the Rewards of Accountability
- 3 Key Elements of Effective Accountability
- How to Build Accountability from the Ground Up
- Nurturing a Culture of Accountability: Ongoing Practices
Redefining Accountability in the Workplace: It’s Not about Blame
When you think of accountability, what comes to mind? Chances are, it involves punitive actions or retribution. The word itself might conjure a sense of discomfort or shame, bringing to mind harsh discipline.
But research on effective accountability has turned that notion on its head. Instead of the traditional approach to accountability, we’re going to explore how to take a more empathetic path forward.
Genuine accountability involves taking ownership of actions, decisions, and outcomes—both good and bad. And a culture of accountability empowers people to do this without imposing harsh consequences. Hence, it inspires people to seek to change, rather than prompting them to change through the threat of punishment.
Focusing on blame makes it hard to truly learn from a mistake. Fixating on blame erodes psychological safety, discouraging people from asking questions and trying new approaches. In contrast, a restorative approach to accountability focuses on learning rather than taking a punitive approach. By cultivating strong relationships grounded in trust, it also builds a more resilient workplace.
In the approach we lay out, we’ll focus on how to build a strong sense of psychological safety to foster genuine accountability.
Reaping the Rewards of Accountability
Let’s briefly examine how a culture of accountability benefits individuals, teams, and organizations.
1. Increased Performance and Productivity
Holding people responsible for meeting goals and deadlines strengthens focus, efficiency, and results. And accountability for behaviours further enhances productivity and outcomes by improving team dynamics.
2. Enhanced Employee Engagement
Taking ownership of behaviours and results fosters a sense of purpose and motivation. As a result, accountability boosts engagement.
3. Stronger Teams and Collaboration
Accountability increases trust, commitment, and efficacy among team members, research published in the Journal of Business Ethics shows. This enhances collaboration and communication, improving teamwork. Relationships will also grow stronger because of the trust fostered by accountability.
4. Greater Innovation and Creativity
Healthy accountability provides a safe environment for taking risks and learning from failures. As a result, people will feel more comfortable exercising creativity and voicing ideas.
5. Improved Organizational Health
A culture of accountability creates a more ethical workplace, prioritizing inclusivity and equitable practices. In turn, loyalty and retention will rise.
3 Key Elements of Effective Accountability
Let’s now explore three core aspects of modern accountability in the workplace.
Clarity
Accountability begins with crystal-clear roles, responsibilities, and expectations. By setting well-defined goals and metrics for success, you create a standard to which employees and teams can hold themselves accountable. And by prioritizing transparent communication and open access to information, you’ll ensure peers know how to hold one another accountable.
Fully articulating the scope of any project, along with key deliverables and deadlines, is crucial to accountability. This will ensure full alignment of goals and expectations. Address any gaps in responsibility or blurred lines between roles, which can undermine accountability by leading to diffused responsibility, as Deloitte says.
Empowerment
A healthy culture of accountability relies on trust in employees to take ownership of their work. It hinges on autonomy, encouraging people to make decisions and take initiative to solve problems. To build their skills and confidence in these areas, offer plenty of opportunities for growth and development.
Support
To make positive changes, people need the appropriate support. Provide resources, tools, and training that will empower them to succeed. Foster a collaborative environment by reminding them of the importance of peer-to-peer support. And urge managers to act as mentors and coaches, not just supervisors. Leaders can offer poignant insights on the effectiveness of employees’ efforts toward accountability.
How to Build Accountability from the Ground Up
Focus on accountability at the individual, team, and leadership levels. Through the following practices, you’ll integrate accountability into your workplace culture.
Individual Accountability
Employees can increase accountability through self-reflection and owning their contributions. By seeking feedback, actively listening, and integrating it into their performance, they can make positive changes. Holding themselves to high standards and striving for excellence will guide their efforts.
View accountability as an opportunity for growth, not a threat or a punishment. After a mistake or a blunder, ask people how they feel things went. They’ll often know exactly what went wrong and why it matters. This gives them the chance to self-correct and help drive the conversation.
Share your own perspective in a straightforward but supportive manner, too. Don’t sugarcoat problems, which could undermine growth, and strive to separate behaviour from the individual, as Keith Ayers writes for the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). By speaking in a matter-of-fact way and then shifting into a focus on solutions, you’ll ignite positive change.
Team Accountability
Clarity on shared goals will help teams take collective responsibility for their success. Through constructive conversations about challenges, they can take accountability for finding solutions together.
And through proactive conflict resolution, they can efficiently address interpersonal issues that arise. This peer-to-peer accountability will help communication and collaboration flow smoothly.
Make accountability a team conversation. When something goes wrong with a project, accountability may lie with several different people. Open a constructive conversation as a group, discussing what you could’ve done better. Perhaps even those who didn’t directly cause the problem could offer greater support next time. As a team, you can also discuss whether your workflow process and deadlines were realistic—or whether you need to take a different approach next time.
Create a practice of reporting to one another with project updates, too. On a weekly basis, each person can share progress toward deliverables.
Leadership Accountability
Foster a culture of transparency and trust by urging leaders to model accountable behaviours, leading by example in ways like these:
- Owning their mistakes, acknowledging how they affected the team and taking initiative to remediate them.
- Maintaining their commitments, following through on plans and striving to meet deadlines.
- Clarifying organizational values to inform ethical decision-making and behaviour. This will encourage others to act in alignment with these shared values.
As an organization, take accountability for ensuring inclusivity, equity, and well-being. Proactively work to correct bias, maintaining equitable structures for development, mentorship, pay, and promotions. When people see the company taking responsibility for these crucial elements of the employee experience, they’ll have more trust in their leadership. Taking all of these steps will also motivate employees to take more accountability for their own actions.
Further, prioritize transparency as an organization. A culture of radical transparency promotes accountability and trust, as Gallup writes. They highlight how Patagonia publicly traces every step of the product journey, from raw materials to retail stores. Internal transparency about things like salaries, business plans, and promotion processes also keeps leaders accountable to their people, fostering a climate of trust.
Nurturing a Culture of Accountability: Ongoing Practices
Take the following steps to continue fostering greater accountability among your team members.
Feedback and Recognition
Engage in constructive coaching to identify and address performance gaps, rather than assigning blame. Giving consistent feedback will help hold employees accountable for meeting high standards. Moreover, it will support them in handling responsibilities more effectively. Use both informal and formal feedback mechanisms, such as 360 reviews and in-depth conversations during one-on-ones. Mechanisms for providing upward feedback to leaders, like 360 reviews, will strengthen their accountability to their teams.
When you notice employees taking accountability, recognize their efforts. For example, if an employee takes ownership of a mistake in a meeting, say, “I really appreciate how you spoke up about that issue. Acknowledging the problem helped us quickly brainstorm a solution.” This will help everyone feel more comfortable taking accountability for their actions and behaviours.
Recognize their efforts to improve after receiving feedback on their performance or behaviours, too. (Keep in mind that employees who regularly receive meaningful recognition are 45% less likely to leave their job.)
Open Communication about Changes
Accountability doesn’t mean rigidly adhering to a plan even when circumstances change. In an agile business environment, it’s crucial to update plans and expectations in alignment with current needs. Encourage people to speak up if meeting a given target seems less feasible or essential. Through open communication about team goals and objectives, you can modify the workflow and KPIs to suit your needs. In these ways, employees and teams can hold themselves accountable for meeting targets while remaining flexible.
Continuous Improvement
Take these steps to support continuous improvement of individuals and whole organizations.
Measure Progress
People can’t hold themselves accountable if they don’t know how to evaluate their success. Goal tracking supports personal and team accountability, clearly showing progress toward targets. Plus, it empowers people to own their success by tracking their results on a daily basis. Such tools help ensure key tasks don’t fall through the cracks, as Nicholas Leighton writes in Entrepreneur.
Adopt a Growth Mindset
Respond to failure with a growth mindset, as David Rock, Emma Sarro, and Chris Weller write in Harvard Business Review. Give people grace in the wake of their mistakes, anchoring on solutions rather than punishment, they emphasize.
Likewise, praise their efforts rather than just their successes. This will encourage innovation and experimentation. As people demonstrate improvement, acknowledge their hard work and celebrate their large and small wins.
Re-assess Organizational Practices
As an organization, regularly review your processes and protocols to identify potential improvements, too. Ask employees for their ideas about how to improve your practices.
By empowering employees to feel psychologically safe in taking ownership of their actions, you’ll strengthen performance and outcomes. As you nurture a culture of accountability, you’ll also enhance the employee experience at your organization. Praise leaders for modeling accountability in the workplace, and reward employees for their efforts as well. As a result, you’ll enhance performance among individuals as well as whole teams.
Learn how Primalogik can support accountability for meeting goals and achieving personal development targets. Demo our performance management system today!
