In our mind, there is nothing worse for teamwork than looking around the table at a team where individually everyone emphatically states they did the job they were responsible for, yet the desired outcomes were not achieved. It is a classic case of a team only holding themselves responsible to their assigned tasks. It can be through a job description, a project plan, a workflow, or any other number of ways that team tasks are delineated.
What is clearly missing is the team’s accountability to each other as a team and to the team’s success. We also recognize how accountability has been unfairly misused as a stick to criticize individuals on teams for the lack of success. What leaders who use this negative tactic don’t understand is that accountability is more of an attitude than a task to be completed.
For example, we challenge leaders to look at a sampling of job descriptions in their organization and report how many times any version of the word “accountable” appears. After seventeen plus years in our leadership and business coaching practice, we are still looking for an organization that passes this simple query, although admittedly some have come close. Yet, the same leaders will not hesitate to hold accountability over their team members without truly understanding what it means. For us, there are two key elements that support a bigger level of mutual accountability on a team, ownership, and trust.
Ownership simply means the team “own” their thoughts and actions. There are no excuses for miscues or misses that affect the team’s mission and desired results. Surely, mistakes and miscues occur on teams, especially in today’s VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) business environment. Team members’ ownership of both the error and the corrections leads to a buildup of the other key element of mutual accountability ~ trust.
We’ve written numerous articles regarding the value of trust in leadership and leading teams. One of the elements of the
trust equation forwarded by Trusted Advisor Associates, LLC is the idea of self-orientation. Essentially, high self-orientation means the team member is more concerned about their own interests above those of the team. Conversely, how self-orientation means the team member puts the team’s interest above their own. This level of benevolence is crucial to building the level of trust that creates mutual accountability in an organic way!
Fans of the Star Trek movies will appreciate the words of Spock in
The Wrath of Khan when he said, “...the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” Mutual accountability dictates the needs of the team outweigh the needs of any one team member built on a high level of ownership and trust!
How are you stepping up to lead your team? If you are not sure,
we can help!
Lead Well!
