Leaders are supposed to hold their teams accountable for doing the work they’re assigned.
All good, right?
Well… yes, and, like just about everything in life, there’s a flip side.
Because people – all of us people – need to learn to hold ourselves accountable.
That’s called Being a Responsible Human.
And always relying on someone else to “hold you accountable” has at least a little bit of an “I’m not actually responsible for my own actions, so I need someone else to exert control over me” vibe.
Please don’t think I’m saying people don’t need to be held accountable for bad behavior. They absolutely do. This is why we have one-on-one performance meetings, why we have improvement plans, and – let’s be real here – why we have courts of law and all that follows from that.
But if we as leaders want to help our people grow (and that’s one of the primary responsibilities of leadership), then we have to go beyond just holding them accountable.
We have to help them understand, and act upon, the reality that they are responsible for what they do, and what they don’t do.
They are responsible for understanding what they’re supposed to do. And if they don’t understand or don’t know what they’re supposed to do, then they’re responsible for asking questions until they do understand.
You, as the leader, are responsible for making sure your people know and understand what you expect from them, as well as what the organization as a whole expects from them if they want to be promoted.
This leads to two more important things: respect and trust. Because without personal responsibility and leadership responsibility, respect and trust aren’t possible.
I’ll add: please don’t think I’m saying that having a friend, a so-called “accountability buddy,” to help you learn to be responsible to yourself is a bad thing.
But note what I’ve emphasized there: learn to be responsible to yourself.
Many of us, and probably all of us at some point in our lives, fail to follow through on the commitments we make to ourselves or to others. So yes, stating those commitments out loud and having a friend who will ask – hey, did you do that thing? – is good.
But the goal is always, as I said, to Be a Responsible Human. To ourselves as well as to others.
Oh, and by the way: that’s not always easy, and it’s not always going to happen. That’s okay. Just keep going.
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Photo credit: © Can Stock Photo / iqoncept