By: Anne Laguzza, M.A.

Every leader wants an accountable team.

🙌 A team who collaborates with fantastic results.
🙌 A team who owns mistakes and offers solutions.
🙌 A team who follows through and meets deadlines.

Teams like this do not happen by accident. They are intentionally built.

The secret to building an accountable team is the leader.

Let me explain.

▶ The Call

I had a client who wanted to build an accountable team. He contacted me because he was frustrated that his team wasn’t demonstrating accountability. 

• They were not taking responsibility for mistakes. 
• They were placing blame on others.
• They were having technical issues and not following through.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

▶ The Realization

As we continued talking, I asked him about his leadership style. He gave a description I hear frequently from leaders –

He was really busy.
He had lots of meetings.
He had some personal matters that had taken his attention away from the team.

Bottomline? He wasn’t demonstrating accountability to his team for his own behavior, yet he expected them to be accountable. 👎

This was not easy feedback for him to hear.

But he was willing to do the work to improve his leadership style and help his team improve, too.

We had to unravel each of the behaviors one by one so he could become an accountable leader. The first step: I had him rate himself on how he thought he was doing as an accountable leader from 1 to 4 (1 = worst, 4 = best).

His overall score was not great.

(How would you rate yourself, right now?) 🤔
Download The Works Consulting’s FREE Accountability Checklist to get started!

It made him realize that he was asking his team for something that he wasn’t doing. He was expecting them to know what accountable behavior was without any model for that behavior.

▶ The Work

We worked together for 6 months to help him restructure his actions and show up differently for his team. Then, he could begin to reset expectations for his team and hold them accountable.

Not everyone stayed. He lost some team members, because they didn’t want to be accountable.

They wanted to blame and not take responsibility. But as he became a better leader – he realized that even one “bad apple” was bad for the morale and the success of the entire team so he supported their departure.

 ▶ The Amazing Results

 Once the leader became the model for accountability, he started to notice that –

🎉The team had less conflict. 
🎉They demanded less of his time to referee disputes.
🎉They gave each other grace to make mistakes.

The trust grew amongst all team members. This leader enjoyed coming to work and his job satisfaction grew as well.

______

I love this client success story for so many reasons, but my favorite reason is that it shows how possible it is to build a high performing, accountable team.

To help you get started becoming an account leader yourself, I created this accountability checklist. Click here to download.

Lead ⬆, Listen 🎧 to & Love ❤ Your People, 

Anne Laguzza

Anne Laguzza, M.A. is the CEO of The Works Consulting (TWC). From reporting to the CEO to becoming a CEO, Anne has diverse experience combined with extensive industry knowledge in nonprofit and for profit companies which has made her a go-to human resources subject matter expert, speaker, and leadership coach for front line leaders to CEOs. Anne collaborates with leaders across industries to develop better systems, maximize productivity and enable leadership to focus on driving organizational success and strengthening opportunities for growth. Connect with Anne on LinkedIn, Instagram or over Email!