Accountability Rules!
Hi Members. This is Coach Gary Henson – I’m the President and Founder for BusinessCoach.com. In all my years as a business coach there are several questions clients ask and now other coaches more and more have been asking me. The question is "What coaching technique or process do I use when I work with clients on having them hold their employees accountable?" There are so many ways to answer this question based upon who the client is, how many employees they have, what the management structure looks like, what the vision of the company is, etc. The best way to answer this question is with an example from one of my clients. This client has over a 100 employees and is in the contracting industry. Accountability is not foreign to the culture – in fact, for some employees they might think that there is too much accountability.
When the owners came to me with this very question in mind here is how I approached it. I started by asking them to define what they mean by accountability, not what the outside world might say or what their friends might say. More specifically, I had the client define what it means to their company and in their company. For this client, accountability meant trusting and communicating with one another to make sure that the project/strategy/item was seen all the way through to completion of the item; that no matter what happened the person was responsible and owned up to the results of the project/strategy/item.
Once we were clear on what accountability meant, I created a inquiry into what method or structure they would use for accountability. This took some time for them to really find what worked for their people and their culture. They found their niche structure through trial and error. They would stick with a certain method for at least 2 weeks to see what worked and what didn’t work. The client determined that for them the structure was face-to-face meetings where updates and results were shared and commitments were made to the whole group. The client quickly learned that accountability was most effective when it was group accountability – not just the owners holding the management and employees accountable, but the whole team and teams within teams holding one another accountable.
The key for this client and all clients I work with is to first define accountability and then determine the structure of accountability. This definition and structure my client created may not work for them 5 years from now. The difference 5 years from now is that they are now trained in the process for creating accountability, where as before for many employees accountability was perceived like a form of punishment and thing to avoid. With this definition and practice of accountability in place, the client can now review the job descriptions, standards, procedure and policies to ensure there is alignment in what those documents say and the structure of accountability.
What about your clients and accountability? How do you approach it?
Thanks, Coach Gary
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