Accountability as an Empowering Principle

90% of employees would say that effectively holding others accountable is one of the top priorities of leadership. But how can you do that without “weaponizing” accountability? Bill and Ralph offer some tips and exercises to improve accountability in your business and strengthen your leadership.

Bill Berthel: Welcome to the Get Emergent podcast where we discuss contemporary topics of leadership team and organizational effectiveness. I’m Bill Bertell

Ralph Simone: and I’m Ralph Simone. And today we’re gonna talk about a topic that often locks people up and the topic is accountability, and it is a topic that we have dealt with in previous podcasts, but we wanna deal with it a little differently. It’s broader much broader than people’s initial reaction to it. You know, Bill, how can we help people with this concept that they often get locked up around?

Bill Berthel: You know, I think there’s some good reasons we get locked up around accountability. I think not gonna throw any stones. I’m probably guilty of the same in, in my leadership path, but, you know, do we use accountability as a tool or a weapon?

Are we weaponizing accountability? And what I mean by that is the scorekeeping. Holding people back or making them feel like they’re getting caught, doing something wrong instead of that place of what we often call co-accountability and getting proactive and partnering on the response-ability.

Ralph Simone: nice.

Well, I think that it goes beyond jamming people up for not delivering on a commitment. And I exactly, I, I like when we in coaching, one of the last steps in coaching is accountability and support, you know, asking people to make a commitment at the end of a meeting and also inquiring as to how can I support you in achieving that commitment.

Bill Berthel: I love that. I love the idea. of you know, supporting and then accountability model, you know, so the data shows that 82% of managers acknowledge that they have limited to no ability to hold others accountable successfully. So if, if managers and leaders are feeling at that level, there’s a challenge, right?

Because 91% of employees would say that effectively holding others accountable is one of their company’s top leadership needs. And so there’s this fear around accountability, I think perhaps, especially in today’s organizations, where we wanna make sure that we’re encouraging individuals to bring their talents, bring their abilities forward.

We’re almost gun shy of accountability.

Ralph Simone: Well, you know, and don’t you think we’re gun shy because we don’t set it up well, in the beginning? I almost think a challenge with accountability is sloppy language. You know, that we’re not clear, what are we actually being held accountable to? And, and I think, uh, I’ve often said this and I believe it to be true is that if our commitments are clear and understood.

That accountability is almost self-evidence.

Bill Berthel: So we gotta make those clear requests and make sure that we’re making good promises. Right. Make sure we’re making clear requests. So it’s understood what we’re being accountable to and to make sure that we’re saying yes to those things, we can truly say yes to, you know, I, I dabbled it a little life coaching for a little while.

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