207 Use These Three Leadership Practices To Significantly Increase Accountability In Your Team | Mahan Tavakoli Partnering Leadership Insight

Mahan Tavakoli: Welcome to Partnering Leadership. I'm so excited to have you along with me on this journey of learning and growth Tuesday, conversations with magnificent change makers from the greater Washington DC, DMV region, and Thursday conversations with brilliant global thought leaders. I am so honored and excited to have you with a growth mindset.

Continuing to learn and share these episodes with your friends and colleagues, helping the podcast reach a global audience as one of the top leadership podcasts all across the globe and helping every single one of us make a difference. In our organizations and in our community, I am really honored and thrilled to have you on this journey.

 The first Tuesday of every month, I share leadership thoughts and perspectives based on what I'm seeing in terms of the organizational challenges. With some of the clients I interact with and some of the feedback I get from you through your emails. So keep those emails coming.

Mahan@mahantavakoli.com. For those of you that prefer to leave a voice message, there is a microphone icon on partnering leadership.com. You can leave voice messages for me there. Now, one of the challenges I've heard from many of you and I also see in organizations, The lack of accountability impacting the performance of teams and organizations.

 I even see this in some of the leadership teams, which you would assume would have great accountability, but leadership teams have the same challenges as some of the other teams also, which is why I decided to talk briefly about accountability and how to have greater accountability in our teams and our organizations.

It won't surprise you that accountability. Essential to high performing teams and organizational culture. However, it's extremely hard. We even have a hard time holding ourselves accountable, , let alone holding others accountable.

 This is not just my experience predictive Index CEO Benchmark report showed that 18% of CEOs cited holding people accountable as their biggest weakness, not just one of their weaknesses, but their biggest weakness. So it's an issue that CEOs are also struggling with.

We can spend hours talking about accountability, but based on my experience, there are three key factors that can make a significant difference on the accountability in your team. One is starting with yourself, being transparently accountable.

Two is setting clear expectations, and three is holding consistent weekly, one-on-one. , with the first one, leadership is, Example, the example we set as leaders is more important than the system structures.

And definitely what we say that also holds true for accountability. So the leaders that do best with accountability, First start with themselves. They are transparently accountable and report regularly to the team how they are performing, what they are learning, and where they are falling short. So there is a consistent cycle, where the team.

Goes through some of their priorities where they individually have fallen short and what they have learned as a result. That example makes it much more likely for other people to be willing to be held accountable. Leadership more than anything else is example. There need to be transparent conversations on accountability starting first and foremost with us, when a team leader tries to whitewash and lacks transparency in being held accountable, that communicates a clear message to everyone else in their team and organization of the importance of accountability.

So first and foremost, be transparently accountable. Second , it's important to set clear expectations. When I ask CEOs and executives, most of them say they have very clear expectations and their team members have a clear understanding of those expectations. There's an exercise I go through sometimes with clients.

I ask them to write their. Five priorities and ask the managers to write the top five priorities for the individual direct reports, and it's incredible how the answers vary. The importance is not showing the dancers vary. The importance is the conversations that come from the exercise that ends up being the real value because it's not about making a point as much as starting a conversation.

So everyone knows whether they've had a good week at work or not, whether they've accomplished what they were supposed to or they didn't, and whether they're aligned with the team and organization's priorities or. Now there are a lot more sophisticated and complex ways of doing this, as you know, and I've mentioned repeatedly.

I'm a big advocate for OKRs objectives and key results, and they can be used very well with respect to aligning around priorities. That said, first let's start with and master the basics, which is making sure there's clarity around the top priorities of each individual as they see it and as their manager sees it.

Gallup research suggests that only about half of all workers strongly indicate that they know what is expected of them at work. So don't assume. You know clearly what your manager expects of you, or your direct reports know clearly what you expect of them. Spend some time to clearly communicate expectations.

And the third is one-on-one meetings. Most meetings are useless. There are a lot more useless meetings since the start of the pandemic, we've talked about the statistics that now professionals spend more than half of their week in meetings, many of them meetings that could be substituted with asynchronous communications, however, or.

Forget the importance of sticking to regularly scheduled one-on-one meetings In most cases, and most organizations, I highly encourage weekly one-on-ones. For every one of the direct reports. I've had sometimes people say, Well, I have too many direct reports to hold one-on-one meetings with them every week.

If that's the case, then you might wanna consider that you might have too many direct reports. One-on-ones are critical for a lot of different aspects, Coaching feedback. An accountability loop, so make sure you hold those weekly one-on-ones and make sure there is an accountability conversation in every one of those one-on-ones.

 Sometimes people hold one-on-ones and they are ineffective without structure, without a proper agenda, you need to do them effectively. That said, don't let the one-on-ones be sacrificed because you have other meetings or other priorities. One-on-ones is one of the most important things you can do with respect to making sure that the individuals and the team are held accountable.

Finally, sometimes there isn't a proper fit with an employee and you need to move them along, and that's fine, but approaching it with clarity and kind candor makes sure that there are no surprises. So many people are shocked when their managers say, This is not a good fit. Or sometimes managers are shocked when the employee says, I don't think this is a fit, and I am leaving the organization.

 The reason for them being shocked is the lack of communication, lack of transparency, lack of kind, candor, which needs to be part of the culture and part of those weekly one-on-ones. There are lots of different things you can focus on in order to improve accountability, However, I find that the most effective teams and organizations do a great job with these three things before focusing in on other factors, including team accountability and spending a lot more time on aligning their OKRs and everything else.

First and foremost, start with yourself. Be transparently accountable. Show everyone that it's okay to learn, grow, and communicate that accountability. Two, set clear expectations. If you think you have clear expectations, challenge that assumption through your one on one and ongoing meetings with your team.

And finally, don't forget that you should consistently hold weekly one-on-ones. The best organizations. Make sure that that is a big part of the practice of management that helps people grow. Becomes a way for two-way feedback and becomes a great loop for accountability. Love hearing your thoughts 

keep your comments coming. Mahan@mahantavakoli.com, and so honored and thrilled that you're coming along this journey of growth and learning with me as to together we are going to continue growing, learning, holding others accountable as well as ourselves. As we have a greater impact on our teams, organizations, and community.