Don’t be fooled! Ignore this common advice on accountability in teams.

I think there’s a high probability that you either believe (from past bad experiences) or were told by someone whom you trust, that you can never trust people to get things done right. If you have to get a job done properly you have to do it yourself! Right?

If what you want is a self motivated, productive, high perfroming team, then you must leave that advice or way of thinking you should leave at the door!

If you were to follow that advice, you’d be an epic micro-manager and have intense stress, because everything will feel like it rests on your shoulders and yours alone. Employees in these situations also tend to check out. So, instead of getting the things from the team that you you want, like cooperation, ideas, proactivity, engagement, accountability and follow through. You will get the opposite.

In reality, when it comes to creating a culture of accountability in teams, you actually need to BUILD TRUST and EMPOWER your team to DELIVER RESULTS so that they can be accountable to you AND each other. This can be difficult at first especially if you are starting from very low trust, but not impossible to achieve with focussed intention and attention. This is something that every progressive and forward-thinking leader should work on in their teams.