Do you want to encourage a culture of personal accountability in your team or company? Start by making it impersonal.
Good accountability, in general, involves having tools and processes in place to generate business metrics. It is impossible to implement accountability without metrics. Therefore, it is necessary to have parameters, or criteria, by which the numbers are evaluated.
For example, if you tell me you can run 10 kilometers in less than 1 hour, I would say that’s good performance—that’s a solid performance metric. If you finished third in your city’s 10k race, I would say you achieved a great result! (This is a byproduct of your performance.)
Creating the discipline and habit to sustain performance at a certain level is only possible if you define that level and measure your performance. If you can run the 10k but never measure the time, you will never know your true performance, and your ability to strive for better results will be limited.
At that point, your performance will be based on a “feeling,” which is not ideal for any business. The best practice is to measure performance and results side by side and learn how the two correlate.
One key factor that makes this process work is that it is impersonal by nature. A stopwatch can only measure time. It won’t judge you or make harsh comments on your performance. It will simply tell you that you completed the 10k in 55 minutes instead of 57. No strings attached.
Is a 2-minute improvement something to celebrate? To evaluate it, we can find ourselves in an endless analysis. But for the sake of simplicity and objectivity, we can say that shaving off 2 minutes indicates improved performance. And since competition rewards athletes with faster times, this performance gain likely hints at better results.
Notice that we are talking about time measurements (impersonal) and general rules of running competitions (also impersonal).
In my view, it is easier for managers today to implement personal accountability principles on teams that understand both the criteria and measurements are impersonal.
The opposite would suggest that criteria and measurements are subjective and depend on someone else’s personal judgment. The company must provide teams with the means to define criteria and measurements for their work, and these must be impersonal.
If good sales performance means contacting 10 new leads per day, that’s a number to work with. If good sales results translate into activating one new customer per day, great—that’s a clear criterion everyone can understand.
This is the foundation of personal accountability: when team members can look at these numbers and determine what needs to be done personally to achieve them.
If you find you can only make 5 calls per day to prospective customers, talk to your manager about how to improve that performance. If you’re making more than 10 calls per day but still not reaching the goal of one new sale daily, it might be time to discuss with the team what could be wrong with the sales approach.
Ultimately, it’s much easier when the numbers are known and can be weighed against other factors. Personal accountability based solely on feelings is not only impossible but also flawed.
GPT-4 was used to correct grammar mistakes in the text.