This post originally appeared on Forbes.
Accountability is deeply misunderstood, according to Roger Gerard, author of Lead with Purpose: Reignite Passion and Engagement for Professionals in Crisis. In a recent interview, he says most people don’t raise concerns about accountability until after a breach has occurred. Instead of falling into blaming and fault-finding, he argues for a focus on leadership development and personal commitment.
“If you need to hold me accountable, that means I must have broken a promise—therefore, the relationship is troubled,” he explains. “Accountability isn’t something that a leader should have to hold anybody to. I should be holding myself accountable for keeping the promises I made to you.”
Set People Up For Success
But for this stance to work, leaders must have already created the crucial preconditions necessary for accountability. “If I assign a person a set of responsibilities, it means that this person and I have had a conversation about it,” Gerard says, “and I’ve done an assessment as to whether that person has the ability, the tools, the relationships and all of the things that are required to carry that out. If I haven’t done that, it’s on me, but I’ve got to make sure who I delegate to is capable of being successful in achieving that role.”
At minimum, leaders must clearly define work assignments, including goals and requirements; provide necessary training or skill development to enable subordinates to execute on those responsibilities; and have access to information, and the hierarchical or sponsorship power necessary to take action effectively and get the job done.
How Accountability Breaks Down
Perhaps the most typical cause of lack of accountability is miscommunication. Often leaders who have unmet expectations believe they’ve set clear goals and assignments when they have not. Many employees experience fallout when they try to close the information gap by attempting to read their boss’s mind.
Leaders often don’t know every particular about how the work gets done at the desk level. They may have false beliefs about what is possible or conflate how things worked in the past with how they should work now. Sometimes leaders’ directives are unclear because they haven’t identified what they want and only know it when they see it.
Gerard notes that leaders usually “assume that they’ve properly communicated. They assume that the person on the receiving end knows what they meant, and they assume that the process that they’ve delegated is going to be able to be achieved without any unexpected circumstances.” But the best leaders, he says, “understand that life isn’t perfect, the world isn’t perfect. Things are going to go wrong, and what we have to do is help people to be successful, because things just flat-out aren’t going to work the way we expect them to work.”
Quit The Blame Game
Unfortunately, the worst leaders displace their own responsibility for lack of clarity or unawareness of true conditions and then hold subordinates responsible for whatever goes wrong. When things go awry, Gerard says, the responsible stance is to ask subordinates “to tell us first what happened that caused them to be unable to carry out the responsibility they promised to carry out.”
If leaders have created the conditions for commitment and responsibility, accountability issues aren’t likely to arise at all; subordinates will blow the whistle themselves. That’s the point the leader should be making when a subordinate goes off-course, recommends Gerard: “If you didn’t keep your promise to me, you should have come to me and let me know that was going to happen somewhere along the line, as opposed to me having to come to you.”
How To Create Real Buy-in
The most effective way to have people take full responsibility for their behavior and results is to ensure they have a voice in decision-making. “If we come together as a group and make a choice,” Gerard explains, “I’m going to be 100 percent in support, regardless of my initial agreement or disagreement, because we did it together and my voice was heard.”
But without that kind of involvement, people substitute superficial compliance for buy-in, and compliance is easily disrupted whenever anything goes wrong. “We reserve our right to disagree,” Gerard says, “and it’s that reservation of a right to disagree that creates problems later.”
As he explains, if things don’t work out as planned, the person who reserved the right to disagree often says, “‘Well, that wasn’t what I wanted.’ And they undermine leadership among their own staff and among their own colleagues, and suddenly we have all kinds of conflict and tension in the organization that didn’t have to be there.”
Why Leaders Undercut Themselves
Given that clear communication and employee buy-in are so obviously essential, why don’t senior leaders do a better job at fostering them? Gerard cites a common dysfunction: Too many people are promoted into senior leadership because of the Peter Principle; in other words, they excelled in their original function, not necessarily in leading others.
Unfortunately, he says, “What you end up with is people in roles who, number one, don’t know what they’re doing, and number two, know they don’t know what they’re doing, so they don’t have confidence. And number three, they’re making it up as they go along, relying on what they’ve been exposed to in the past, which may or may not be good. So you end up with new leaders who think that the mantle of authority has been put on them, and they get to boss people around or tell people what to do. That’s not leadership. That’s not even good management.”
Five Commitments For Successful Leadership
Instead, Gerard says, if you want solid buy-in and performance from employees, senior leaders must commit to five things:
- Provide the support people need to be successful.
- Take employees’ ideas and advice seriously both to improve their effectiveness and to create more job satisfaction.
- Provide planned development and mentorship to help them learn and grow.
- Compensate them competitively to ensure retention.
- Perhaps most importantly, stand by them when things go wrong.
In the normal course of business, Gerard notes, “We are going to have people who complain; we are going to have situations where things didn’t work out quite the way we thought they were going to work out.” But these problems can be overcome if leaders let subordinates know, “‘I’m going to have your back.’ That’s not a risk to you. ‘I am responsible for your environment.’ If you treat people this way, they’re not going to go anywhere else, and they’re going to work their hearts off for you.”
By focusing on effectiveness and development, leaders can create supportive environments and cultures in which employees are more likely to take ownership and perform at their best. This way, organizations can dispense with the blame game altogether.
Onward and upward—
LK