Managerial Accountability of Your Team Creates a Positive and Respectful Work Environment
“Merely delegating and distributing tasks to team members in the hope of accomplishing them does not work as required for many managers and organizations.” As a successful leader, you will always have the behaviors you set up for your team to deliver to you by fostering and enabling a culture of managerial accountability. In fact, creating a culture of accountability improves effectiveness and creates a positive respectful, and lively environment in which to work. Knowing that ensures that work teams are aware of their respective roles and motivates them to be more responsible and proactive. Accountability also allows team members to feel part of something more important than their personal vision. Also, when done correctly, it can increase your team members’ skills and confidence.
It’s a harsh reality, but the management accountability of your team will only be done by you. So once you own the results and act on the relationships and the consequences of your behaviors, you will find that your team can reach new heights in productivity and value created. And the accountability requires mental effort and an active mind, as it is not a random, emergency, or routine process. Instead, it is a planned work of reflective thinking, continuous performance review, and continuous improvement of results. Accordingly, the ability to activate and apply administrative accountability and hold your team members responsible for their tasks may be the difference between success and failure.
Accountability Functions and Benefits
While building a culture of accountability can be complex, it is necessary and achievable because it is a way of reviewing and improving performance and developing employee skills. The positive and effective exercise of accountability has benefits that can be summarized as follows:
1. It generates trust between individuals and teams.
2. Increases efficiency and enhances productivity
3. Eliminates confusion and saves time
4. Allows people to meet clearly defined expectations
5. Contribute to correcting underperformance efforts, and appreciating and rewarding excellent performance
6. Reinforce company culture and achieve more tremendous success
7. Establishes compliance of employees and work teams and holds them accountable for their decisions, behavior, and actions
8. It promotes sound relations between business leaders, managers, and employees
Some studies show that many managers do not hold their employees accountable as they should. And that some organizations also reward their employees despite their poor performance. To address this, there are a set of suggestions for business leaders and future managers on how to improve managerial accountability in their organizations:
1) Set annual goals for employees
Some managers find that setting annual employee goals is tedious and unnecessary, which is not right. Suppose the standards by which performance will be measured are unclear or not accurately prepared. In that case, accountability will not occur according to an objective approach.
2) Apply the principle of expectation
It’s a principle that often goes unnoticed. Still, it can make a big difference in your responsibility as an outstanding team manager. In the long run, people tend to rise or fall to our expectations and their own expectations of their performance. Therefore, you have to believe in the capabilities of your team members and express to them your expectations for their performance and future achievments.
3) Prioritize candid performance evaluations
Each organization has different criteria for evaluating the performance of its employees. Still, it does not really matter if the performance evaluations are formal or informal, annual, semi-annual, or quarterly, as long as the employees’ goals are clear. This step is the product of the Thoughtful employees’ goals. Managing it will become much more manageable if it is meaningful and measurable. It is a rational rather than emotional process.
4) Eliminate random stimulus policies
Review your organization’s compensation and incentive policies and ensure that they are fair and match the purpose for which they are intended.
5) Face the differences head-on
As a distinguished and influential manager, manage crises of all kinds directly, and teach your departments to do this to hold the employees themselves accountable if inevitable conflicts arise between them.
Moreover, a simple organizational structure and clear managerial accountability are necessary for effective leadership. The process of administrative accountability in the organization may seem complex and challenging. But that does not mean abandoning its application or not paying attention to following it up. It can accomplished over time, by creating an administrative structure and structure that supports this process.
