How to build a culture of accountability without micromanaging

Those decisions getting reopened, those deadlines getting missed, those conversations you’re having over and over and over and it’s driving everybody nuts. They are all pointers to a lack of accountability. When it comes to any issue on a team, big or small or corporate or tech or construction or medical or finance or whatever it is, agency, founder led, venture backed, whatever it is, all roads lead to accountability or lack thereof. Why? Because accountability is one of the kind of stickiest topics that we kind of run into in the workplace.

But it’s the question I get asked the most in workshops, in coaching, consulting, in the talks that I give, because it is the biggest gap. We all kind of know it, but because the word has such a bad reputation, we avoid it. And so the question is like, well, how do I hold people accountable? We don’t even know what we mean by that. So today we’re going to talk about what we mean by that and how to create accountable teams.

I’m Leah Garvin, and this is the new Manager Playbook, where I’m here to share tips, tools, and strategies to make managing your team the easiest part of your job. Because dealing with people is hard enough, especially when those people don’t hold themselves accountable. Now, first and foremost, we got to define this sucker, because accountability, just like the word feedback, has so much fricking baggage behind it that it needs its own seat on an airplane, okay? Accountability is often associated with blame, and punishment, and throwing people in the bus, and I did something wrong, and hold them accountable.

It’s like, ugh, I don’t want to be that person. But accountability is actually about ownership. And this is how I talk about it in all three of my books, from Unstuck, to The Unstoppable Team, to the new Manager Playbook, because we have to actually redefine it in order to hold people accountable as a leader. Because the word needs a rebrand, and until it gets rebranded, we’ve got to do that with our own teams. So when I say accountability is actually ownership, what do I mean?

Well, I love to set the stage with the metaphor of renting versus owning a home. And whether you’ve rented or owned a home before, you can kind of just roll with me on this. When we’re renting something, right, we maybe take pride in, let’s say we’re renting an apartment, and it’s super cute, and we’ve decorated with all our stuff, and we’ve hung pictures up even, even though when I was renting, I never hung pictures up, because I didn’t want to have to patch the holes at the end, but we go all in, and we’re really, really taking care of that thing.

But when the sink gets clogged up because we got too much hair down the drain, we call our landlord, and it’s on them to fix it. They might not bring in the best person to fix it. It might be their friend that’s a handyman, that kind of sucks, but they find the person and they pay the bill. The buck stops with them, the landlord. Now when we’re owning a home, it’s very different, right? This is an investment.

We take pride in it. We’ve poured maybe our life savings into it. We’re maybe in the hole because this thing’s been so expensive with the economy, right? So we are going to be proactive, and we’re going to think bigger about it. We’re going to think, how can I make sure a problem doesn’t even occur in the first place? You don’t wait till there’s water coming through your roof to deal with it, but you want to solve that before it even gets there.

So you’re replacing things before it’s broken. You’re filling cracks before they get worse. You’re getting that foundation set. You’re taking care of the yard, right? You’re doing all these things because not only is it an investment, but you take pride in it. It’s a reflection of you. Think about if our teams brought this ownership mindset to the way that they were doing their work, that they didn’t treat it like we’re the landlord and they’re just showing up to collect a paycheck, but they brought this ownership mindset.

Now when we think about that, how would it look like when a deadline came up and they were about to miss it? What would it look like when a decision was made and we were moving forward with it, and it was going to cost a lot of money to revoke that? What would it look like when we have meetings that go on and on and on, and people waste like $800,000 of people time in a meeting because it took too long?

Those things don’t happen when you have an ownership mindset. When people feel personally accountable, they show up completely differently. And so the first things we have to do as leaders is recognize the gaps in accountability. And I want to share one really clear example. So this came up from an agency I work with. They are an advertising agency based in San Francisco. They work with clients from big, big tech companies to smaller construction companies. They do branding, they do digital marketing, they do web, they do all sorts of stuff.

And this client runs account services. And they said, what’s the point of even having deadlines? Because when we miss a deadline, it doesn’t matter. There’s no consequence. We don’t actually change anything about our process. We don’t do anything differently. We don’t actually track hours differently. There’s literally no point of having deadlines at all because nothing happens when we miss it. There’s no fallout. There’s no conversation. And I said, you know what else there is now? There’s no accountability there, right?

There’s no accountability. Who cares? Why have a deadline? And this happens with all my agency clients and folks that I’m friends with that run agencies as well. They share that like, hey, I don’t actually know how to do something about that information. If you are tracking work and tracking time and things, deadlines are missed or you go over budget really with anything. This happened to me when I worked in tech. If you’re missing deadlines and there’s no conversation about missing it and nothing happens, it doesn’t matter, then deadlines don’t matter.

You have designed the system to which deadlines do not matter. That’s by design, right? Whatever’s happening there, if there is no conversation, if there is no consequence, this happens with my clients that run med spas. Hey, if you are sitting there and you don’t fill your chair, right? And you don’t have clients coming in and there’s no conversation about that and your capacity is really low. So you’re there 20 hours in the week, but you see people for like five hours or 10 hours and you’re only at like 50% booked.

Well, if that just keeps going on, it doesn’t really matter. And you’re still getting paid. There’s no conversation. There’s no feedback. Why would you do something differently? So when we find that our team members are not being accountable to something, the deadlines, the bookings, they’re making a decision and they’re like, well, should we talk about this again? Or they’re in meetings for hours and hours that go nowhere. When that’s happening, it is a signal to you that they are not feeling accountable to the work or the bigger picture.

They’re not treating it like an owner because then it’s like money has no cost, right? When we’re running something like money has no cost. And this is something that gets really, really bad in the corporate world. So my corporate listeners here, if you’re in HR in the corporate world or you’re an executive in corporate, you get this really hardcore. It’s a big, big challenge. Time doesn’t cost anything, so to speak. So we can waste a lot of time.

We can spend a lot of energy just doing things over and over. It’s not the same thing when you’re a business owner. My business owners listening are like, what do you mean time is free? Wouldn’t that be a luxury? But the challenge shows up in the same way that our team members, because they’re employees, time doesn’t really cost anything to them necessarily. And I get it. Sometimes folks are commissioned only and different things like that. So there’s a little bit of different investment.

But when your team members don’t equate any sort of value with time being wasted, or time not being spent the right way, or that money and time go together, that’s where you get a real big accountability challenge. So how do you make this shift? How do you help people be more accountable? Well, there’s a lot of debate around how much should we expose folks into revenue numbers, into the metrics and things like that. And I think it really depends industry by industry.

But I think for one, we have to show people what they’re really working towards, right? What is the goal? What is the why behind it? Are you trying to hit a certain launch date? Are you trying to hit a certain user count? Are you trying to deliver a service of this quality or hit this profitability goal? We have to get people into the background so they know like, what am I actually kind of being bought into?

What am I owning? Okay, then right there comes clear expectations. We have to show them what success looks like. We don’t want it to feel like, hey, I got to commit to something. I don’t even know if I can achieve that or deliver on that. It becomes very, very scary. So it’s a blocker of accountability. And this is where psychological safety really comes. And I know I’m going to take a little bit of a turn here.

But if we feel like we cannot say, hey, I don’t really think this is doable. We can’t flag risks without being held against us. We can’t say no. We can’t say, hey, it’s looking like these priorities are really conflicting. We can’t have that conversation because we’re in a team where it’s like, you say yes, or you’re not a team player. Or we just agree to stuff that’s unreasonable because there’s no other option. If we don’t have safety to have that dialogue, you’re not going to have accountability because people are not going to want to own the thing that they feel uneasy about.

So a huge driver of accountability is actually having candid conversations, opening the door. So now people say, hey, what’s feasible? What’s realistic? What’s aspirational? What’s a stretch goal? We can go really, really big and bold with what we want to achieve. And we have to have real conversations about what is going to happen and what is not. What’s above and what’s below the cut line. That fuels accountability because we think, okay, like, all right, we’re having a dialogue here.

I can work through this. And you’re going to see, even if your team commits to less work getting done, they will deliver that. It will happen. It will not get off course. And you can actually add more. So you have way more output at the end when you have accountability. Because the opposite is what I saw every single day and every single team I worked in, first hand, and what I see in every company I support now as a consultant, is that we make a decision.

And then we spend like hours and hours and meetings to make a decision. And then folks like, did we want to do that? Really? Or like, I didn’t know what the decision was. And I was working on this other thing. We are figuring out how to cascade information and decisions. Things are getting reopened. We’re changing course midway. We realized, well, that was a priority. But like now it’s not really. All of that takes so much more freaking time than getting it right in the first place.

And we try to move really fast without sort of crossing our T’s and dotting our I’s around accountability. And we’re going to find we get behind. So the next piece around creating accountability. So I said that ownership mindset shift, right? Having a conversation like, what is the consequence of missing deadlines? You know, well, it might be that we reassess budgets, that we have projects take longer or shorter, or we have, you know, like, we’re not going to be able to have this end of the year, you know, bonus thing, right?

If we don’t, if we keep missing deadlines each and even when our budget, there’s got to be a consequence, right? It doesn’t mean it’s a threat. It’s not a punishment. It’s saying, hey, here’s what we’re going to do. Here are the stakes of meeting that or not meeting that. We all agree to, we all know. And then we move forward. Then we have to create safety in while we get to that plan, making sure everyone has an opportunity to weigh in, because here’s where you’re going to learn like what was realistic or not, where people were just nodding along and then deciding like, I’m not going to really do that after the fact, right?

So we have to figure that out also. So that’s the second part. And then the third part, along with those clear expectations, right? Because people have to know what they’re signing up for. And then the last piece is to constantly be learning from this, right? So this is where the fallout of not missing hitting those deadlines or whatever is. You have a postmortem. You have conversations. Okay, here’s where we budgeted. Here’s where we netted out. What happened?

Here was the timeline. Here’s where we actually landed. What happened? And you’re reiterating and iterating and iterating, iterating on your process, on your staffing plan, on your budgeting, on your resource plan, right? All of these things come together. That creates more accountability because you’re saying, okay, like, yeah, we shot in the dark last time, but we’re not just doing that over and over. And I had a client and I loved her framework. She said, does it sound a little bit harsh?

I don’t know. We kind of weighed with that. Are we making mistakes that are learning mistakes? Are we making mistakes that are actually negligent mistakes? And it creates accountability to learn from the learning mistakes. But actually it chips away at accountability to make mistakes over and over and no one says anything and no one talks about it. And so we really want to be in this growth mindset around accountability, talking about it, learning from it, having postmortems, having conversations, setting expectations, asking, hey, is this doable?

What are the risks? Having it be a dialogue. And then our team members get bought in and we ask them, what do you think? What’s realistic? How would you solve this? We’re enlisting them in the conversation. We don’t feel accountable. If someone tells us, here’s what you got to do, do it or do it. Like no matter what, it’s too bad. Are you going to buy that house? If someone just like says, hey, you haven’t seen this before.

I signed it over to you. Start paying the mortgage. You’re like, I didn’t even see that house. I don’t want to leave that neighborhood. I don’t even want this. No, we wouldn’t feel like owners was something that we didn’t know the full story about. And so I know that there’s a lot of edge cases here. I know we might do all of this and our team members still keep having deadlines, missing deadlines. There’s going to be a lot of other things.

But this is the foundation, okay, for creating accountability on your team. And this is one of those subjects that I always say, like, if you say like, let’s talk about accountability. Everyone’s like, like rolls their eyes or like, you know, if you weren’t the manager, maybe like what happened to me, you would be just like disinvited a meeting. So it was like, no way. So, so like, that’s, that’s not the goal is to make it this boring rule setting thing that like, okay, we’re going to hold people accountable now.

No, it’s saying, hey, we all want to really make sure that we’re all bought in. So how are we going to get this done? I know we all have the overarching goals the same. If you talk about your value, you talk about why you’re here. And if you need support on having a values conversation, that’s I got your back there. But you talk about, you have the structure and then we say, how are we going to get this done?

How are we going to make sure what are the vehicles we’re going to put in place, the checks and balances, the processes, the, the, the accountability measures, right? So that we don’t miss that. This is a conversation with your whole team and they start to see, okay, yep, I can sign up for that. Okay. This is the new round. Yep. I I’m actually responsible for that area. You get them involved in the conversation and they will step up.

It may not be the first one. It may not be overnight. But when you allow these things just to happen and happen, and we’re like, okay, another project went by like deadline. You’re kind of like, man, whatever, who cares? Even if you deeply care, but your team members were like, well, if they don’t say anything, it must be okay. We just see more of the behaviors that we don’t address. So this ownership mindset, this is game changing.

For business owners, when they implement this and the strategy I talk about in the ops playbook and that we map out for their team, they’re saving 20 hours a month right out of the gate. That’s tens of thousands of dollars a month just by creating simple accountability mechanisms in the corporate world. This is 20 hours a month you’re saving as a manager. So you could, you could have all this time back to be more strategic, to be planning more, to be having your one-on-ones, developing your team, developing your own career, taking a vacation, eating lunch that’s not sitting at your desk.

You could be doing so much other things, right? If we want to be creating this space and all of it happens through accountability. So you got your tools. I know it’s a complicated one. So if you need support, hello at leahgarvin.com. Talk about, hey, how do we bring this to life on my team? Whether it’s through the ops playbook, which is your done for you system, really mapping all of this out for your team, or a workshop, a conversation, a training on how to create this buy-in on my team.

Either that, something else we’ve got you covered. This is something that you can make the shift on your team. I have seen it over and over. I have facilitated it myself. I have experienced it firsthand in the corporate world when I deployed these tools. This is possible. And we do it by actually having that conversation, starting it. We don’t just let these problems fester and move over and over and over. Because these are the things that chip away at your team’s integrity, as I mentioned.

And they actually send high performers packing. I don’t want to be on a team where, hey, this is the plan one day and this is the plan the next and everyone’s always debating everything until infinity and we can’t get anything done. No, high performers are like, screw that. I’m out of here. So this is a retention strategy. And we’ve already covered retention is the most expensive or turnover is the most expensive challenge in a team, right?

It costs between 50% and 200% in employee salary to replace them. So not only are you saving that 20 hours a month at least, this is hundreds of thousands of dollars in efficiency, in productivity, right? This is adding to that bottom line by addressing this. So you address this accountability issue and you will have transformed your team. I’ve seen it a million times. We can make it happen for you. See you next time.