Partner Article

How to Hold People to Account Effectively

In this article for business leaders and managers I’ll be exploring holding your people to account, but the same principles can be applied to customers and suppliers both inside and outside the organisation, to ensure they do what they have contracted to do.

As a small business, leadership and success coach and trainer I hold myself accountable for everything I deliver to clients, but it’s not the norm for those businesses and individual clients to do the same with me!

Why is that? Why do we find it so difficult to hold people to account?

The fact is there are many reasons why you as a leader or manager aren’t holding your people to account, or are finding it difficult to do well.

•You may not have considered it particularly important

•You may think you don’t have time to do

•You may not know how to do well

•Or, you might even think that your people will not take responsibility and be accountable, so it’s impossible to do!

I’ll explore the first two reasons in turn before exploring how to do effectively.

1.If you’ve not considered its importance before then you need to explore the consequences of not doing it. These might include:

•Targets not being met

•Lack of focus for the individual/team/department/organisation

•“Busyness” not effectiveness

•Punishing good performers (by giving them more to do)

•Rewarding poor performers (because there are no negative consequences of poor performance, and other people pick up their slack)

•Best workers getting disillusioned and de-motivated

•Best workers leaving

•Worst workers staying!

If any of these are affecting you at the moment, then it’s important to start holding other people (and yourself) to account.

2.If time is your biggest issue then maybe you’re not spending sufficient time on the “right” tasks, the tasks that make a difference to you and your staff.

Review how you’re spending your time and ensure you’re doing what only you can do. This will start to free up a little of your time which you must use wisely.

You could just as easily call regular review and follow up meetings (the 4th Rule of Monkey Management) “accountability meetings” because you’re holding people to account for what they’ve previously agreed to do.

So, for those of you who do recognise its importance, or for those who make the time, but are still struggling to do effectively, let’s focus on how to do it well.

The checklist below is a good starting point to explore what needs to be in place in order for you to hold staff to account well. This will help you see that accountability can be easy when it’s the end of a process involved with setting people up for success, clearing obstacles from their way, and regular two way communication.

Work through the points below to see where you are currently falling down.

1.Know your key organisation, department, or team targets/objectives

2.Know your people’s roles and responsibilities, and what are acceptable standards of performance

3.Know your people – their competence and confidence levels, and what motivates them

4.Set goals and key priorities with your people

5.Set the parameters for accountability (what they will be measured against, how, when, where and why)

6.Ensure processes are in place to support achievement (e.g. training, appraisal, reward etc.)

7.Know your company procedures for preventative counselling, discipline and grievance

8.Recognise progress and reward achievement

9.Deal with underperformance issues promptly

10.Minimise and manage conflict if it impacts on standards of performance and therefore service or product quality

If you feel you can’t hold staff to account because they refuse to accept responsibility, then it’s your job to help them take personal responsibility for their own jobs and their performance levels, in the same way that you must do for yourself.

This may not be easy, and with some, you may need to take the directive approach and “tell it like it is.”

The ‘4 Rules of Monkey Management’ might be a good starting point, but the bottom line is that you’ll need to go right back to basics. This means:

•having initial meetings with people to clarify specific goals

•discussing how they will achieve these goals and whether they need support

•agreeing the support, training or resources required to achieve goals

•arranging and holding regular follow up meetings to check progress and encourage and reward.

If you use this in conjunction with the 10 point checklist above, you should find the “holding to account” or “reviewing,” a fairly straightforward process. As I mentioned earlier, it’s actually the work you do before this in sharing information, setting direction and empowering people that is crucial to its success.

Given all that, I live in the real world and I know from personal experience that sometimes setting goals and standards of performance and holding every member of staff to account can be difficult!

Sometimes companies or senior managers tolerate underperformance by some members of staff e.g. personal friends or family members, or long standing employees who are coming up to retirement. They decide that life is just easier to tolerate the status quo!

In these circumstances you must decide for yourself whether you want to tackle it, by weighing up the risks and consequences of action versus doing nothing. At the end of the day, it’s down to your own personal integrity and the principles and values that guide you.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Julie Johnson, The Success Club .