#Collaborative post
Unless you plan to use technology to eliminate the need for a team, then you’re going to need to learn how to be able to lead them. One part of the leadership that is not often given the focus that it needs is the importance of accountability in the team. In order to make sure that kinks are ironed out, mistakes noticed, and growth achieved, you need your team to be honest about their work. But how do you do that, when it can seem like their best interests lie in the other direction?
Make sure they can be honest about it
First of all, you have to provide an environment where your team feels comfortable about owning up to their mistakes or sharing trouble that they have had with work on their plate. This means that you must always consider reprimands or repercussions for failure to be the last resort. There are better ways to handle employee mistakes, using them to form teachable moments or to address the systemic issues of the business that might have kept them from being as productive or successful as they should have been.
Measure and track their work
Of course, while having your employees talk honestly about their work is one thing, you want to view the situation from another lens, as well. You want to make sure that everyone can be held accountable, even if they don’t always realise that they need to be. To that end, using a system to track your organisational goals and the individual objectives and key results that lead to them can help you get a much better idea of where your team is in terms of their work. Aside from offering more transparency as to the performance of the team, it can also allow you to spot potential productivity problems ahead of time so that you can pull your employee aside to talk to them privately about them before it leads to any missed goals.
Take responsibility, share reward
This is one of the most important lessons for any leader to learn. If there was a failed goal, then the buck stops with you, not with your team. While you can address problematic elements that contributed, you have to take the overall responsibility, publicly, so that your team doesn’t feel overly threatened by the repercussions of failure. At the same time, you can foster success by rewarding the team when they do meet goals and most especially those workers who perform well above expectations. There are plenty of reward systems that you can implement in the workplace that can unlock a whole new level of motivation and productivity within your team. Just remember, team members are held accountable, but team leaders take responsibility.
The question of accountability is vital in managing a team. If you don’t foster an environment that places importance on it, then you can end up with a team that’s more inclined to act selfishly, cover up mistakes, and have more interest in their own position than the goals of the business.