Building a Culture of Accountability

If you want to build a successful team, there is at least one question you must eliminate.

Unfortunately, it’s one of the most common questions anytime something goes less than

perfectly. Miss a projection, someone asks. Lose a sale, someone asks. Find a mistake, someone

asks. Miss a meeting, ship a faulty product or release a stupid public statement…fingers get

pointed, and everyone asks… “Who did it?”

That’s a terrible question. Here’s why. First of all, pointing fingers wastes time. Worse, having to

ask that question indicates someone – perhaps everyone – is unsure about his or her

responsibilities. While that’s not an uncommon problem in business, it cannot be an issue if you

want to be successful.

There are several ways to establish a business environment in which this question is rare if it is

ever asked at all.

First, give everyone clear areas of responsibility as well as clearly-defined success benchmarks.

I’m not saying you should only have one person doing each specific job. It’s always good to

have cross-trained people who can step in when necessary. The idea here is to have a clearly

defined structure of responsibility. If something goes wrong, you can point to one person and

find out how it happened.

Next, establish an environment where competition is high, but it’s always trumped by collective

achievement. Look, unless you are working on a trading floor or in a cut-throat commission sales

outfit, you are all on the same team hoping to achieve the same goals. Find ways to motivate

your team to think this way. Shared bonuses, group celebrations, whatever it takes to motivate

everyone on your team to excel.

Speaking of, if you don’t have the right people in the right places, not only is failure

unavoidable, but the person responsible may not even understand what they did or didn’t do to

create that situation. This goes back to step one. You don’t need “someone” in a given job. You

need the best possible person doing that job. Hire, train and staff accordingly.

One of the best byproducts of having a culture of accountability is that solutions are much closer

than they would be otherwise. If you know who is responsible, you likely have a better idea what

happened. That makes you one step away from getting it fixed.

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