Accountability in the Workplace Starts With Your Standard

Accountability in the workplace is the standard a team actually holds, measured by what leadership walks past. It is set before anything goes wrong, through clear expectations, daily measures inside people's control, and a leader who holds himself to the same line. The conversation after a failure is the last step, not the system.

Most leaders come at accountability backwards. They go looking for it the week a deadline slips, and by then the only tool left is a difficult conversation with someone who never understood the standard in the first place.

I have watched this in Special Forces and I watch it now with business leaders. The team is not failing because people are lazy. They are failing because nobody ever made the standard hard, clear and visible, and because the person at the top is running a softer version of it than the one he asks for.

Here is how I think about it, built out of the parts of my life where the standard was not optional.

What does accountability in the workplace actually mean?

It means people know what they own, they know what good looks like, and they know that the line holds whether or not anyone is watching. Accountability is not punishment. It is clarity plus consistency.

The test is simple. Ask anyone on your team what they are responsible for this quarter and what success would look like. If you get five different answers, you do not have an accountability problem. You have a clarity problem wearing an accountability costume.

Clarity is your job. If you expect your team to execute a task a certain way in a certain time, you have to take the time to make sure they understand what needs to be done, how you want it done, and when you need it. If you assume they get it, you are more in the wrong than they are.

Why do people avoid the hard version, and why does it matter?

Because avoiding hard things is human, and because the hard version is where the strength comes from.

I have done a lot of hard stuff. Rock climbing in canyons in West Texas and on cliffs in West Virginia. Special Forces Assessment and Selection. The Q-Course. Ranger School. Most mornings, getting out of bed and working out is hard stuff. The commonality is that finishing feels good, and the harder it was, the deeper the sense of accomplishment burns into memory. Flick and I still talk about hauling an elk out in one trip, and about the long trek back to Hell's Half Acre.

Last spring we had our grandsons for the weekend. The three-year-old loves to drive his pedal tractor up and down our driveway, which is no small job because it runs 100 yards with a rise in it. On Sunday he wanted to take the tractor up the sidewalk to the front door, steeper grade, shorter distance. Partway up he lost momentum, looked back over his shoulder and said, "This is too hard, Papa."

I told him all he had to do was keep pedaling. I gave him a small assist to start, and he pushed those little legs down hard, the back tires slipped, and he kept pushing until the tractor moved and he got to the top. He said, "That was hard, Papa." I said, "I know, and you did it."

He had the same look his brother had after climbing onto the couch, and the same one I had at the top of a climb. Hard, and I did it.

Very few things worth having come without effort, and the effort is where the difficulty lives. If there is no difficulty then there is no effort, because it just happens. That is what makes it worth something. Same as reps on the bench. Two hundred and twenty five pounds starts out hard and leaves you sore. Do it again and the soreness fades and the strength builds, so you add weight, because it has to stay difficult if you want to keep gaining. Your mind works the same way. The first sales call is tough. The hundredth is a walk in the park.

A team that is never asked for anything hard never finds out what it can do.

What standard are you actually holding?

The one you enforce on a Tuesday when you are tired, not the one on the wall.

I continue to be amazed by people who sit around and expect, or demand, that things be given to them. One thing has held true since the dawn of time: if you do not get up off your ass and put the work in, you are not getting anything.

I had it too. I retired from the Army as a Green Beret Lieutenant Colonel, so obviously I should be paid a certain number and handed a large organization to lead into great business success. That was naive and selfish. My experience was valuable. It was not equitable. But I expected no different than the twenty and thirty somethings I complain about. Where is my paycheck. Do you not know who I am. What I have done.

None of us is entitled to anything. Even if you have put the work in, that does not make you deserving of what someone else has who walked a similar path. That is envy. You get what you deserve when you earn it, and you still may not get it. You can work hard your whole life and never get what you deserve. Is that fair? Of course not, and neither is life. The only thing that is fair is your choice to work hard and do what is right.

Here is the part leaders miss. Hard work does not guarantee the win. I can make a thousand sales calls in a week and nothing says I close ten deals. If you hold your team accountable only to outcomes, you are holding them accountable to fortune, and they will learn to manage your perception instead of doing the work.

How do you make accountability measurable without micromanaging?

Move the measure onto the things inside people's control, then check it often enough to matter.

We all want the big thing. The successful exit, the happy family, the beautiful house. The larger the measure, the higher the probability of not achieving it. So change the measure. What if success was defined as doing the specific things inside your control that raise the probability of the big thing, and doing them every day?

Then each day you increase the odds and you also bank a win. Wins feel a lot better than the long struggle. Small victories inside your control add up, and they are independent of whether fortune shows up. When you do get the big thing, you will deserve it.

Run it like this:

1. Write down what the person owns. Not the project. The outcome, in one sentence, in their words.
2. Define the daily or weekly action inside their control that raises the odds. Calls made, drafts shipped, customers visited. Something they can do regardless of how the market behaves.
3. Set the number and the check-in before the work starts. Accountability agreed in advance is a standard. Accountability introduced after a miss is a reprimand.
4. Give them the resources and the authority to actually do it. If you have not, the failure is yours.
5. Review the controllables first, the outcome second. If the inputs were there and the result was not, you have a strategy problem, not a people problem.
6. Hold the line the first time it slips. The standard you walk past is the standard you set.

If you answer yes to all of that and the person still fails, there is one question left: did you put them in a position beyond their ability to succeed? In the end you are the one in charge. It is your responsibility to help your team succeed, and it is your responsibility when they fail.

That is also the line between accountability and control. If you are checking the inputs you agreed on, that is accountability. If you are checking the work itself, read Camden on how to stop micromanaging.

Why does "do you want to get better?" come first?

Because no accountability system works on someone who has not decided.

One of my favorite things Jesus is quoted as saying is, "Do you want to be healed?" He asks it of a man who has been crippled since adolescence, living by a pool as a beggar, hoping the water would fix him. The man says everything except yes, until Jesus asks again, and once more. The lesson is not the miracle. It is the choice.

The sailor who falls overboard has to want to grab the life ring. The businessman struggling to make ends meet has to accept the advice of a mentor. The soldier retiring after thirty years has to actually learn the lessons that make the next phase work. I am dealing with my own version through surgical recovery. Do I want to get better? Yes. Am I willing to put in the effort to get better? That is the real question.

Saying yes is easy. The meaning comes in the effort that follows the yes. So before you build a performance plan, find out whether the person has said yes and meant it. If they have not, the plan is paperwork.

What does accountability look like for the leader?

It looks like exposing your own weak spot on purpose.

We have said "lifelong learners" in the intro to the 10x Your Team podcast since the first episode more than six years ago. Plenty of people say it. Fewer mean it, and fewer still do it on purpose. Being open to other people's ideas broadens your perspective. That is not the learning that moves you forward. Intentional learning is diving into the areas where you are weak.

I have always loved the story Arnold Schwarzenegger tells in Pumping Iron about having puny calves. To force himself to work on them, he wore big bulky sweats to the gym with the sweatpants cut off at the knee, so he and everyone else in the gym could see the part of his body he was worst at. That is the level of honesty this takes. Cut off the bottom of your sweatpants and expose the weakness.

The harder version for me is the business. I have spent my whole life working out and trying new things to get stronger, and that kind of difficult I enjoy. Changing how we serve our tribe is much harder, because the obstacle is the fear of failing them. I never fear failing myself. It sucks and I feel like a dumbass, and that is fine. Letting other people down is the thing I cannot stand, and it goes back to my Boy Scout years.

So when it is time to change a program to make it better, I struggle. What if they do not like the new system? Then I have let them down. The way through is believing the change is for the better, which means our tribe gets more out of it, no matter how comfortable I am with what exists now.

Wanting to be better always comes with change, and change comes with difficulty and self-doubt. Nothing worth having is easy. Your team is watching which version of that you live.

Where to start

Pick the one standard on your team that everybody knows is slipping and nobody has named. Say it out loud this week, agree the measure inside people's control, and hold it the first time it moves.

Then check your own. If you are asking for a standard you are not running yourself, your team already knows, and nothing you say in a performance conversation will outrank that.

The Green Beret Leadership Program builds this into the leaders underneath you, so the standard does not depend on you being in the room. If you want to see where it is breaking down first, start with the 7 C's of Leadership assessment.

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