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6 Managing and holding people to account when things do not meet the standards required by the organisation
Accountability it’s key to achieving results, and yet many leaders fail to hold employees accountable. When done right, enforcing accountability leads to outcomes and increased confidence for the employees who followed through. When accountability is lacking, performance, organisation culture, and morale suffer. When employees are not held accountable for missed deadlines, bad behavior, or poor performance, a leader’s credibility is damaged and loyalty from their team wavers. This ultimately impacts the leader’s ability to inspire high-performing, winning teams.
• Have the difficult conversation While holding employees accountable may sound confrontational, it doesn’t have to be. Just remember to focus on the performance, not the person. Assume that most people genuinely want to do a good job and aren’t being difficult on purpose. Start with a specific example: “John, I noticed that XX happened. What’s your perspective of what went wrong here?” Throughout your conversation, seek to understand why certain actions were taken or tasks were performed. Examples include: “Can you walk me through the process you followed here?” or “Did you experience a technical issue we need to fix?” or “Would it help if I sat in on your next meeting?” Employees may not understand how their behavior affects other team members. Other common reasons for inadequate performance: a. The manager didn’t give clear instructions b. Extra training is needed c. There’s a technical issue d. A personal issue is seeping into work e. Conflicting priorities
• Address the poor performance as soon as possible Deal with the individual one-on-one and as quickly as possible. After all, nothing is likely to change unless you confront the problem. You also don’t want your frustration to build to the breaking point or for an employee’s non-performance to become a big issue. You need to figure out the why behind the poor performance. This is where you’ll need to find a way to make your leadership style match the situation. For example, a new employee may just need additional training, while an experienced employee has too much on their plate. A highly conscientious employee may do well with some coaching while a lazy-bones may respond better to heavy authority. Regardless, you need to be clear about the action or behavior you expect from the employee going forward and have suggestions for how to make that happen. Key principles of holding people to account stem from you and your leadership role and how consistent you are in applying the process.
Many times, the reason you aren't getting the best performance from your people is because you're not crystal clear about what you want them to do. You know what you want them to do inside your head. But until we all have the benefit of ESP-type mind reading, it's your job to communicate exactly what you want your people to do. And you need to write it down on paper or in an email. When you do, think big: go beyond piecemeal objectives and focus on the things you want them to do over the next six to 12 months. You should also use the principles of SMART goals--short for specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and time-related. That means you need to be very specific about what you want done and when you want it. You can also set bounds for the goals in the sense that you can have a minimum you need, an optimum result, and a visionary outcome that surpasses expectations.
While checking in with your people seems like an obvious thing to do, it's amazing how often it gets overlooked when you get busy fighting the daily fires inside your business. What sounds simple to do is actually devilishly hard. But if you want to build accountability then you need to establish a cadence of meetings with your team where you review that printed set of objectives in a regular basis--maybe every two weeks or every month. One tip is to set aside one day a month where you meet with all of your direct reports for 45 minutes each. Yes, that might mean spending the entire day in these meetings. But the pay off is that you create alignment and get your team off and running in the right direction. You can even schedule these days a year in advance to ensure they become the norm. If you can do that, you'll find that your employees will come to the meeting prepared to discuss their progress versus trying to adjust to requests for random updates.
One of the things that we all struggle with is realistically assessing how we are performing relative to our goals. We tend to be overly optimistic about what we can achieve. That's why when I hold my update meetings, I take on the mindset of an objective outsider who might be called in to evaluate a project. That way, I can talk in brutally realistic terms about whether something is on time or not--and then talk about what someone might need to get back on sched- ule. That's where the coaching element comes into play. Your goal should not be to just slam an employee for falling behind, but to help them with resources, contacts, or the new knowledge and context they might need to do to make their project a success.