Ralph Rajs, a consultant with The Table Group, shares the difference between peer-based and behavioral accountability.
Think for a second about the best team you have ever been on. What was it that made the team awesome? Was there a particular attribute you can point to that contributed to it being a high-functioning work or sports team?
In my work as an organizational health consultant, this is one of the first exercise I usually do with teams I’m working with. There are always a few common attributes that come up, but the one I want to focus on today is accountability. People commonly say one of the things that made a team great was that the team members held themselves accountable to each other. In a high performing team, where everyone is completely invested in the singular goal of winning, players are quick to admit mistakes and hold their teammates accountable to the standards agreed upon by the team.
With all great teams — work or sports — there are a few key factors that come into play before you can work on accountability. In his best-selling book, The Advantage, Pat Lencioni talks about the importance of building a foundation of trust and ensuring the goals and initiatives are 100% clear to the team before you can create accountability.
You might be wondering how to get started on building that foundation. The two best places to start are peer-based accountability and behavioral accountability. Once you understand what these two accountability practices are and the status of your team, you can put together an action plan that will help propel your team to be the best one you have ever been a part of.
Most of us are very familiar with authoritative accountability, where bosses hold their people accountable for their actions. The higher order and much more effective approach is peer-based accountability. That’s where we on the team hold each other accountable for actions rather than going to the boss. This denotes a level of trust and commitment to the mission that is so high that the team will not allow a poor performer to go unidentified. I witnessed this within a personal training team at a club I was managing. There were two lead trainers who were so invested in the club and their team’s success that they held their teammates to a high standard of accountability. The club’s general manager didn’t have to do anything to address the poor performance of any of the trainers, which freed the general manger up to work on initiatives that could help grow the business. It was magical. Among your team, do your people call out unproductive behavior by their peers? Do they challenge one another or offer constructive feedback to one another? If not, this is a very good place to start.
The second is behavior accountability, which contrasts with measurable accountability. Measurable accountability is purely holding people accountable to numbers, revenue targets, sales numbers, etc. Very clean and clear cut. The more effective and difficult standard is holding people accountable for their behaviors that precede the numbers. We can typically see a person’s work ethic, habits or self discipline shortcomings well before they fail to hit their numerical targets — and yet we’re reluctant to address the behaviors because they’re subjective and tougher to coach. The higher order is to establish the expected behaviors that you know will lead to success and not waver in your accountability. It’s messier and more difficult, but you will be saving a lot of time and money by addressing the behaviors before the numbers fail.
Your work teams have the potential to be the best team everyone has been on, but it takes trust and commitment from every team member as well as the manager to reinforce the high performance behaviors.
Accountability also increases dramatically among a team when individuals feel like their input matters. People need to weigh in to buy in. It takes a leader who has the confidence to be vulnerable and to relinquish some control to have the best team ever.
