“I love you. Now, brace yourself.”

I was meeting with a business owner and his leadership team. He had built a fast growing, high performing company.

He was focused on moving out of active management and on to other business endeavors.

But his company was running into serious obstacles. Not only for growth but even sustainability.

The woman, who spoke the words above, was part of his leadership team.

The owner was working against his success. She saw it and called him on it.

Accountability in Action

He had the humility to listen.

He built a culture where she felt comfortable being honest.

It was tough. Accountability is often discussed. Yet, it is rarely demonstrated (voluntarily) at the leadership level.

Want to build great leaders? Want accountability on your teams?

Make sure you practice it yourself.

What Do Leaders Want? What Do Leaders Need?

What is the one thing most leaders want more than anything else?

Independence. The freedom to do whatever they want.

What is the one tool that helps leaders become the most successful, in the shortest amount of time, with minimal risk?

Accountability.

What we need is sometimes at odds with what we want.

What is accountability?

Accountability is the willingness to own and accept responsibility for one’s actions (or inactions.)

It’s about far more than being willing to accept blame.

I once worked with a different leader who was very quick to accept blame for failures.

But he wouldn’t own his responsibility to create the needed results.

That isn’t accountability. That’s a self-image issue.

It is not leadership.

What makes accountability so important for leaders?

Accountability is important because it makes three things possible that leaders need:

• Credibility: It is the key ingredient for building credibility. Credibility is the most critical attribute any leader can have. A leader (or leadership team) that isn’t trusted will always struggle to accomplish its goals.

We intuitively know this. It has been well established through research. James Kouzes and Barry Posner’s work: Credibility: How Leaders Gain It and Lose It, Why People Demand It is the most well-known summary on that topic.

• Goal Accomplishment: Tough goals, important goals often lack strong drivers behind them. Accountability helps create the urgency, the focus and the support needed to be successful in the pursuit of what might not be urgent, fun or engaging – but critical.d
• Strong Culture: A culture where leaders take responsibility for their actions and results creates a culture that doesn’t tolerate unexceptionalism.

Above accounting for yourself? At what cost?

The word “accountability” has a sort of negative connotation connected to it. Maybe because we don’t tend to use it unless we feel like someone has gotten off track. It feels corrective.

However, the word “accounting” doesn’t have a negative connotation. I like my accountant. It helps me to have someone who can make sense of “where I am at” financially.

It doesn’t feel like correction when I work with my account. It feels like clarity.

So I can make better decisions.

When we, as leaders, refuse to be held to account the following will happen:

• We will fail (eventually) to deliver results. Even if we are fantastic right now – we’ve removed anyway for anyone to adjust our perspective or choices. Because we are unaccountable.

But not only will we fail to deliver results, but we’ll also teach those who follow us how to fail as well. This is as simple as the fact that most leaders accomplish their results by facilitating the success of others. If we, as leaders, refuse to lead our teams to success, we are teaching them to accept failure.

• We will increasingly become more skilled with excuses (instead of solutions.) Leaders who won’t accept accountability have an almost knee-jerk reaction towards creating excuses instead of finding solutions.

Our teams will reflect this. They will need to support our excuses and make up new ones for us. They’ll learn not to bring up solutions to problems, because it will expose our excuses for what they are.

• We’ll create cultures of avoidance. Because of all the awkwardness created by the above, everyone learns to avoid talking about challenging issues. We don’t address problem behaviors. We don’t address poor performance. We don’t ask hard questions. We might not even ask easy questions.

Everyone learns that survival and getting along is more important than relating well and getting things done.

Unaccountable leaders create unaccountable cultures. Unaccountable cultures, at best, become mediocre. Or fail.

Sears became mediocre. Amazon hasn’t.

Radio Shack became mediocre. Best Buy hasn’t.

It’s just how it is.

The power of accountability

Generally, leaders understand accountability better than others—as they often hold others to account.

They’ll be quick to tell you that this is necessary for good vendor relationships or effective management.

The problem is, a major driver for entrepreneurs and for those who work their way up the leadership ladder is to experience less accountability, less oversight…to have fewer people telling you what to do.

Once they get there, and they can enjoy their newly acquired freedom, there is a strong tendency to drift towards the mediocre.

Accountability, when structured well, is an unavoidable ingredient for success.

Ingredients of accountability for leaders

There are four key ingredients for effective accountability for leaders:

1. Be clear on the value of success: Why is it important to succeed at whatever you are pursuing? What are the costs or consequences of failure?

The clearer a leader is on this answer the easier it is to pursue it.

2. Alignment: What do you want to accomplish? What needs to be a priority to accomplish this? What behaviors are needed to make this happen? What needs to be measured to track progress?

Alignment allows you to track how actions here will translate into results there.

3. Humility: The two definition of humility, that I like best, is, “Being willing to be known for you who you are.” and to consider others interests as well as your own.

Humility in leadership is not a well-understood trait. Because of the amount of confidence, ambition, and drive needed by many leaders we often think that humility can’t co-exist.

In fact, humility takes incredible courage and willingness to address hard truths. Most leaders can’t hack it.

Those who have it, discover that they are now free to correct mistakes, to grow, to improve, to attract and retain high performers, to be innovative and to pivot when needed.

4. Metrics: I mentioned this in #2. But often leaders drive cars without a dashboard. We have no idea how fast we are going, whether there is gas in the tank or if the engine is overheating.

As Peter Drucker said, “What gets measured gets managed.” The best leaders create, adapt and tinker with metrics until they understand which metrics help them drive success.

Conclusion

Remember the woman in my story above?

She soon followed the owner as the first CEO of that company.

They were already one of the highest performing companies, nationally, in their industry. This year, she led a 30% increase in profitability, for their best year ever.

Her success was possible because the owner had enough humility to be accountable.

Her continued success will be dependent on her own openness to accountability.

I think she has what it takes. But she’ll have to wake up every morning and choose it.

At some point, she’ll need someone to say to her, “I love you. Now, brace yourself.”

So will you.

What will you start doing today to make sure someone can say that to you?

Take good care,

Christian

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