The most important step of accountability you are probably skipping

How do I hold my teams more accountable? How do I get them to be more accountable? Which essentially is a question, how do I get people to do the things they said they would do or the things that I asked them to do? Welcome to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where you get a masterclass in managing your team with ease in 15 minutes or less. I’m Leah Garvin, your host and team operations consultant. Through this show and my programs with small businesses and corporate teams, I condense a decade of experience driving team operations and some of the most influential companies in tech into strategies to save you time, money, most of all stress.

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Welcome back to the show. So I don’t think a week has gone by where a manager has not asked me, how do I hold my teams more accountable? How do I get them to be more accountable? Which essentially is a question. How do I get people to do the things they said they would do or the things that I asked them to do? And first, when I talk about accountability, I got to break it down because the word has a bad reputation, right?

We associate it with blame and punishment and consequence. But when I talk about accountability, what I really mean is people taking personal responsibility for something, right? They feel that sense of ownership, meaning they proactively solve problems. They don’t just like get stuck and say, Hey, help me with this and throw up their hand. Okay. And so the reason that helps folks do what they say they’re going to do is because they know the buck stops with them.

And this is the shift that we want to make in our teams. And this is why I talk about account really so, so much in my writing, in my podcast, in my videos, in my new book, the new manager playbook coming out January 27th, because accountability is really folks feeling that sense of personal responsibility, feeling a sense of ownership. This is going to shift them into people that just work through a task list or agree to something they know that’s not going to happen.

Right. And they actually shift their mindset to thinking, Oh, how can I do more? What’s a better way to solve this problem? What’s a better outcome for the client or what’s a better outcome for the user, whatever you’re doing, whatever line of business. Okay. And so we always want to shift our team members into that sense of accountability, that sense of ownership. But what I want to talk about today is, you know, how do we do it?

And I think a lot of times we get stuck as leaders in the ask. We were really clear. We set clear expectations. We asked, Hey, you know, can you get this thing done by Tuesday at 2 PM? Or can you put together an SOP for this thing? Or can you create a plan for this marketing concept? Or can you, you know, work on this project with this other team member, right. Or can you report on your metrics and really share, you know, what’s going wrong and how to hit the numbers?

We assign a really clear ask. Okay. But then when someone doesn’t do that thing, that’s where we fall short. Okay. And someone says, well, no, I didn’t get to it because of this thing or something else came up and we don’t really know what to do there. We get stuck. And what I want to land today is that accountability is not really, is just about the ask. The ask is important. We’ve got to set clear expectations.

Otherwise there’s no way someone can be accountable. But accountability is more about the follow through. That’s where the magic happens. So let’s take the example. This one comes up probably the most for folks is team members are supposed to be reporting on progress. Let’s say serving a number of, of customers, let’s say, right. So I have some med spa clients and they ask their providers, you know, how many, how many patients did they see this week?

And they have to report on that. Right. And how, how are they trending? Right. Getting more signups and getting more rebookings and things like that. So they ask their heads of each department to report on things like this. And at the end of the week, if someone reports, Hey, we didn’t hit our numbers and you say, okay, you know, good luck next week. There is no reason for that person to be accountable to increasing that trend in the metrics.

Same thing with any sort of, um, service that has memberships. Okay. I work with some gym owners and they have all of their staff is working towards increasing the monthly memberships. Now, if folks report on that or you give them a report, you say, Hey, the memberships are down. What happened? And they say, well, I don’t know. There’s no follow through. There’s no reason that person’s going to step up. You know, let’s say we are, you know, you run an engineering team and the metric is to really, you know, increase, you know, quality metrics or to have something move faster.

Or if it’s, you know, UX design, have something be more clear for a user to use. If someone doesn’t have any follow through to improving something that they have committed to, why are they going to do it? They’re not, okay. They’re not going to do it. And that is why it gets so frustrating as a leader when you say, well, this is your job, just freaking do it. But when we want people to shift in that sense of ownership, right?

We want them to look at the bigger picture. We want them to look at, okay, so my numbers are down this week. What might I do? What do I have to try? What else can, what other levers do I have? This is the shift and that all happens in the follow through. So with that example, with someone, you know, sharing the reports, I think a lot of times we as the leadership, we hand people their numbers, their results, their metrics.

And we say, Hey, you know, here’s how you did this week. Tell me what happened. That right there. We’re still keeping the accountability ball on our court. Simple shift I suggest is to actually ask your leaders, your team members, your department heads, whoever’s really owning that metric to present the report to you. Okay. Say, Hey, end of each week, show me what the numbers are and you know, share the plan of how we’re going to turn these around.

If there’s any dip, how we’re going to keep consistent. If we’re, if we’re hitting our numbers steadily, just by shifting it, having them do the reporting to you, having them have to find the report, know what it is, know where to get it. And then to be able to tell you what their plan is, you have completely turned around this accountability equation. You have created the follow through on them. Do you want some hands on support for all of the topics I talk about on this show?

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DM me the word sprint on Instagram, or email me at hello at leahgarvin.com and let’s build your unstoppable team. Now there’s one more step of follow through is once they say, okay, so this week we didn’t hit our numbers. Here’s why. Here’s my plan for, for next week and that next week they have to have done that plan. And so they come to the meeting and they’re driving that conversation and they say, okay, we did the plan that we share with you last week, and here’s how we did.

And if they didn’t hit it again, they better have a plan of how they’re going to get everything rallied around and fixing it for the following time. Okay? So this applies whether you are in a small business or a corporate team, anytime someone is committing to something, there’s gotta be an accountability chain, which is some type of follow through. So if the deadline didn’t get missed because there was some other things that came up and they have a plan of how they’re going to make up time and that deliverable, then they’ve got to make up time.

Otherwise they’re just, it feels like we just say whatever and there’s no integrity and it doesn’t matter. So this is something I’ve also seen quite a bit in engineering teams, especially in the software space is we, you know, software is a little bit fluid and flexible and sometimes deadlines can move and it doesn’t really have a huge impact. But if you get into that habit where deadlines aren’t meaningful, the follow through becomes really hard to manage.

And so I would say it’s, you know, to always ask your team members to have a story as to when and why something has to slip because feeling that rigor around it and knowing, Hey, if we’re going to move this, there’s gotta be justification. We have to have tried to hit it. This is going to create that sense of accountability. If you have a team of any variety where deadlines don’t matter, hitting our metrics doesn’t matter.

Coming in under budget doesn’t matter. You know, for my agencies out there, listening design agency, marketing agency, PR agencies, whatever it is, right? If things come in under bud or over budget and there’s no conversation, there’s no followup, then why are we tracking budget at all? Right. And so when we have something that we did not hit or deliver on, we didn’t do as we said, we were, your team has got to have a story as for what it is.

And then you’ve got to follow up on that. And this is where things can get tricky, right? It doesn’t mean someone’s next step is they’re getting terminated. No, but if it’s a consistent pattern where someone is not hitting it, then that is a real indication. You didn’t have a feedback conversation around it around expectations of the role around expectations around the metrics and really get to the bottom of what’s going wrong. Okay. So accountability, it is all about the follow through.

It’s a little bit about the ask. You got to have the ask. Otherwise you have no chance, but it is mostly, it is the follow through is where all the magic comes together. This is where you actually create that flywheel. People do something. They say they’re going to do it. They are reporting on it. They’re tracking it. They’re proactively problem solving, how to get back on track if they get off track. And then there’s a followup.

So they know, Hey, we don’t just say whatever, but we actually follow through who we say we are always improving. Okay. And this is how you get your team members to feel that sense of ownership, right? Cause the proactivity right there is that ownership mindset. We’re looking holistically. We care as much as you care as the leader. And when you have that shift, your team transforms into profit generating machines. They transform into leaders. They transform into many CEOs of their departments.

It’s really game changing for you. So that is why it is so important. Okay. So do not forget about the followup, follow through all of that, because then what’s the point. All right. See you next time and get ready because I talk about all of this stuff in my book, the new manager playbook coming out January 27th. Cannot wait. That’s all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning into the managing made simple podcast, where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive.

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