 How to increase accountability in my team is a question that I've been asked many times by clients, team members and colleagues. In this video I explain why many managers find holding team members to account difficult and go through what you should do to make increasing accountability in your team much easier. And at the end of the video I give you my recommendation for a great book to read on building accountability by a legendary business leader. My name is Jess Coles and I've spent 25 years working in corporates and household names through to SMEs at all management levels. I've been involved in turning around businesses and team performance multiple times and have achieved dramatic performance improvements. And I've personally learnt a lot about holding people to account. If you're new to this channel, Enhance.training provides online business courses to help professionals, managers and business owners improve their performance. And if you like this video, please give a thumbs up, subscribe and share it with friends. Holding people to account is a critical part of getting things done through your team. So why are so many managers so poor at it? According to a Harvard Business Review article 46% of managers are poor at holding people to account and this is consistent across all levels and cultures. A key reason for this reluctance to hold people to account is that managers that do hold people to account often lose some social support within the group or the team. There is a personal cost to holding team members to account and many are reluctant to pay this price. With this insight it is easy to see why so many people in positions of authority are soft on accountability. From my personal experience I believe that you can hold people to account and still maintain the goodwill and respect of your team and remain liked as a manager. As you can imagine how you hold people to account and yourself to account is critical to achieve this. So let's talk about what holding team members to account means in terms of team performance and team morale. Accountability is a critical part of getting things done. If the team doesn't deliver much the poor team performance will impact on the wider business. And if this poor performance is replicated across the business it is unlikely the business will survive for long in the modern day competitive business landscape. A quote that sums it up for me. Accountability is about delivering on a commitment. It's a responsibility to an outcome not just a set of tasks. It's taking initiative with thoughtful strategic follow through. It's a quote by Peter Gregman. I think that creating high performance teams and delivering good results is nearly impossible to do if there is no accountability at an individual level and at a team level. Poor accountability impacts team morale. Let me explain through an example. Imagine you have a few good performers on your team and one who doesn't perform. If the one who doesn't perform does not face any consequences for that poor performance then as a manager you're saying through your lack of actions that poor performance is okay. If you were one of the good performers or even another team member how would you feel? Would you be incentivised to work hard and do a good job if your colleague was getting away with doing a poor job? Would you feel fairly treated or even consistently treated? In this situation it is likely that you'd feel less motivated and produce less. I certainly did when I was in this situation and I've seen the impact of poor accountability on teams in so many businesses. Poor accountability is compounded if the good performers are not rewarded. Without accountability and little upside or downside there is little incentive for team members to do a good job. The best people to leave to work at companies where their efforts do make a difference further impacting the team performance. So create a level playing field for all and create incentives to do a good job by holding everyone in the team accountable. Accountability gives everyone and particularly the good performers an opportunity to shine. Increasing the accountability on your team must start with you setting clear expectations. If team members are not sure of what is expected of them how will they and you know when they have met those expectations. If you don't set expectations you only have your opinion against their opinion as to whether they've done a good job or a poor job. If you set clear expectations milestones and goals then it is very clear if the team member has met the milestones and goals agreed or not. One way of setting milestones and goals is for you to pick a target and then pose this on the team member. This method is quicker and easier for you. Your team member may never really own these goals because they are your goals imposed upon them which will impact their sense of accountability. Another way of setting milestones and goals is to discuss and agree the goals with the team member. By setting the goals together they become joint goals and thus the team member is much more likely to own them. This improves their accountability and motivation to achieve the actual goal set. I would absolutely recommend this joint approach to setting goals and milestones. In my experience it works so much better. Put the expectations, milestones and goals in writing so both parties have a reference document or an email to refer to. This stops any kind of loss in translation issues or future disagreements as to what exactly the expectations and goals were. And if you want to be able to hold team members accountable you must first set expectations and agree milestones and goals. As a leader of a team or business you set the rules. How you conduct yourself and what you say sets the tone, culture and behaviours of the team. What you allow and what you don't allow are some of the strongest messages you can send to your team intentionally or not. Therefore you need to consistently follow your own rules if you want everyone else to follow your rules too. Don't say one thing and then do another. A simple example would be say if you are always five minutes late for meetings. I bet you your team members will often be five minutes late too no matter how many times you tell them to be on time. Actions speak a lot louder than words so make sure you're prepared to be accountable yourself. To work hard to hit your own targets and goals and behave consistently with the rules you ask others to follow. You can't manage what you can't measure. It's a well known and often used quote from Peter Drucker. To create accountability you need to measure progress. Measurement is an essential step to consistently undertake to know where you are and if the goal has been reached. A really simple example would be for instance if you'd agreed to send out marketing emails to a thousand contacts. Then by keeping track of exactly how many emails you'd sent out you'd know your progress towards your goal. You'll know exactly when you've reached the thousand emails. If you don't measure progress you can only guess. So if you want to know where you are you must measure progress towards the set goal. Then deciding what to measure is a really important step. What to track may be obvious like the previous example. Or you may have many options of what to track if for instance you're managing a large IT implementation project. What you choose to measure will create the focus for the person doing the task or project. Get this wrong and achieving your goals might be harder or you might actually never reach your goal. A simple example could be having a goal of achieving a hundred thousand pounds of profit in the first year of a new service that you're offering. If you measure and target revenue you may end up with a lot of low quality contracts thus hitting your revenue target but missing your profit target by a mile. In fact I've seen loss making situations with this dynamic. So choose what you're going to measure carefully and try to spot and think through any unintended consequences. Creating visibility is the next step to take after you've chosen what to measure. Make public the goals and how you're progressing towards reaching those goals. If you have a team member engaged in one of several projects then circulate progress of each project amongst the team. Have a whiteboard and keep track of progress on the board. Have weekly team meetings to review progress and celebrate the successes. There are so many ways of creating visibility and by creating visibility you're engaging peer pressure. No one likes to fail or be last. Those towards the bottom are likely to try harder to catch up and those at the top are likely to try harder to stay ahead. The performance improvement that can be created by visibility and peer pressure always amazes me it can be amazing. And to gamify getting to the goals even further add in prizes for each milestone achieved and getting to the actual goal itself. And don't think money necessarily. Get the team members to think of fun activities to do for each milestone and goal. Whatever you do create visibility of progress and make this public. Give as much useful, honest and specific feedback as you can to your team. So why is feedback so important? Well if you don't know what you're doing well and what is improving, how are you going to improve? Honest feedback helps team members to improve and shows you care about improving their skills and performance. So take the time to give feedback, praise when you see great work. Ask team members to take others through how they achieved a great result. Help and coach those that are struggling. Don't procrastinate in giving feedback. The value of feedback diminishes with time so provide feedback in a timely manner. And be specific when giving feedback. This really helps the other person understand exactly what is good or what is not. And the more specific your feedback the more helpful. And being specific shows the other person that you're taking note of what they're doing and thinking about it before giving feedback. i.e. you care enough to make the effort. So give feedback regularly and coach and mentor any team member that would benefit from your help. Following up is a critical tool to drive accountability. And the managers that struggle to deliver and through their teams nearly always don't follow up enough. So let me give you a fairly detailed example of following up. So on day one I ask one of my team members to do an analysis of a group of customers. To find out which buys the most, which makes us the most profit, which needs the most support etc. We agree at a deadline 10 days from now to complete the analysis. And I send a quick email to outline what we've agreed following the conversation. On day two I pop around to their desk and ask how the analysis is going and if I can do anything to help. This allows me to help if needed but also to check that they have started it and understand what is needed. On day four I pick up the phone and ask about progress. I want to find out if all the elements I've asked for are progressing, what problems they might have and how I can help them resolve any of those problems. If progress is behind I pick up the phone on day six and check what I can do to help. If progress has been good I probably won't call. On day eight I might call again just to check everything is going well and if the deadline will be hit. And on day ten or maybe even earlier I get what I've asked for and to the level of detail and quality I required. By showing interest and offering to help where needed I'm signalling through my actions that I care about this project. I'm saying it is important to me and I need it delivered on time. By following up you make the project important to the other person. Obviously how you follow up is really important and you have to use your judgement based on the person you're dealing with. You don't want to micromanage the person nor do you want to be demanding a full update every five minutes. But you do want to offer help with any issues. Answer any questions they have or clarify what you want or what is needed. If you don't follow up and say the previous example you set out the project on day one and then you called on day ten to get your analysis. Your actions are effectively saying to the person that the project is not that important to me. You may get exactly what you wanted or you may get something else or you may even get nothing. The point is you don't actually know until day ten and it's too late to change what you're getting at that point. Follow up regularly if you want to get what you wanted when you want it. And by following up you're also giving the other person the opportunity to get help from you and manage your expectations. This helps both parties and then very good team members will proactively manage you. They'll provide you with regular updates so you won't need to follow up. Make sure you follow up regularly with your team members to help drive accountability. As promised at the start of the video, one of my favourite books on creating accountability is Execution. The Discipline of Getting Things Done written by Larry Bostey and Ram Charan. And you can see my well-thumbed book here. This is an excellent book and well worth the read for anyone in a management position. Larry is credited with turning around Ally's signal at Honeywell after a 34 year career at General Electric. And he provides some amazing insights. In summary, creating accountability in teams does take time and effort to achieve. Yet it's essential if you want to have a team that performs and delivers. Driving accountability into your team generally requires you to hold yourself accountable. You need to set expectations, milestones and goals for the team members and the team itself. You need to measure progress towards the defined goal and you need to create visibility so that all can see the progress of each person and the team. Giving feedback and following up regularly will significantly increase the success of your team and thus your performance as a manager and leader. You can achieve amazing results with a motivated and accountable team. Everything you do to increase accountability in your team will be well worth the effort you put in. Your sense of satisfaction and your career will absolutely thank you for it. Enjoy managing and leading your team. And do visit us at enhance.training and take a look at the courses and resources to help you manage your team more effectively. And if you like this video, please hit the thumbs up button below and subscribe and hit the bell to get notified of our weekly video releases. This really helps us to produce more videos to help you. Thanks very much for watching and I look forward to seeing you again soon.