Call "Chips on the Ball...
Hold Others - and Yourself - Accountable for Results
In my opinion, lack of accountability is one of the top (if not the top) leadership problems in business today.
Accountability is doing the job you were hired to do and doing it to the best of your ability. You either do the job or you don’t. Back in Philly, calling “chips on the ball” was in effect an agreement that everyone would live up to their responsibilities and uphold their end of the bargain. In a business sense, calling “chips on the ball” is the agreement made between an individual and an organization where both parties agree to live up to their commitments and do their part. The organization agrees to pay the individual for successfully completing certain duties and tasks, and the individual agrees to perform those duties and tasks successfully and completely, day in and day out.
So here’s the $64,000 question: If 10-year-old kids playing games can hold each other accountable for results, why can’t we? Why are leaders oftentimes hesitant or even embarrassed to ask people to do their jobs? I think there are three interrelated reasons why we don’t do a better job of holding ourselves and others accountable:
- Unclear, inconsistent and unrealistic expectations.
- Doing “the job” has become optional because there are no true consequences for not doing it.
- Participatory management blurs the lines of accountability.
For the most part, the accountability problem in business today isn’t due to a lack of caring. The leaders I know care a great deal. It is true they need some real-world solutions for how to hold employees accountable for doing their jobs in a litigation-happy, ever-more-complex environment. But the real issue is that they’ve come to believe that accountability and responsibility aren’t all that important because their leaders don’t hold them accountable.
How You Doin’?
- Do you hold the people on your team accountable and thereby model this behavior for the rest of the organization?
StreetSavvy Techniques
- Establish crystal-clear, reasonable responsibilities and expectations that people can be held to. It’s neither appropriate nor fair to hold people accountable for generalities such as “Do a good job,” “Provide WOW customer service,” or “Deliver contracting excellence.” How is a team member to know if she has effectively accomplished such a vague task? Perhaps her definition of “excellence” is different than yours.
Numbers, specific timeframes and measureable results provide better direction and allow for true accountability. For example: “Complete the entire report, including the financial analysis, by March 16th,” is a definitive statement against which employees can be held accountable. Either they achieve the result or they don’t.
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