Keep Yourself Accountable

Domain: Self Awareness - Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Leadership is not just about leading others. It's also about leading yourself.

In fact, without the self-awareness and discipline to lead yourself, it becomes much more difficult to lead others.

We've all worked for a leader who doesn’t accept their shortcoming, shifts blame and avoids hard conversations. Those leaders don't tend to inspire motivation or influence high performance. It's hard to accept accountability from a leader when it's clear they don't accept accountability themselves.

On the other hand, a leader who can openly acknowledge these things is much more effective at building trust and driving results. By modeling personal accountability, those around them will begin holding themselves more accountable. As a result, this leader actually spends less time "holding others accountable" because they've created a culture of both personal and shared accountability. The culture ends-up driving the desired behavior.

Today, we'll cover some strategies for maintaining personal accountability…

Clear goals

The first step of keeping yourself accountable is knowing what that looks like. That means having clear goals and expectations for yourself.

This occurs at different levels. Yes, the goals you have for your organization or department are included. But also start thinking about goals for a big project or initiative. Before any big performance event, ask yourself what you are looking to achieve. Doing so allows you to self-assess and reflect on how you did after the fact.

For really large initiatives, break goals down into micro-goals. For instance, you can set specific goals for the discovery phase or a large project. Once that phase is complete, you would establish new goals for the next phase. This approach keeps you agile and supports the decisions by doing model.

Find an accountability partner

Despite the title of this article, one of the most effective ways to keep ourselves accountable is by finding an accountability partner. That's because we can have the tendency to justify or create excuses for ourselves when things haven't gone as planned. It's hard for us to be objective.

This is where a third party can be helpful. Finding a trusted friend or colleague who will give you honest feedback can go a long way. Trust is important here as you want someone who will be honest with you but won't criticize just for the sake of criticizing. It should be someone who has your best interest at heart, and because of this, is willing to say hard things when you've gone off-track.

Making the ask can be uncomfortable for some. Consider proposing a mutual accountability relationship so that both parties benefit from the exchange.

How you work

Understanding how, when and where you work best also helps with maintaining self-accountability. This is more than just productivity. It's leaning into your own tendencies and behaviors in order to best position you for success. This is a form of leading yourself that others on your team will pick-up on.

For instance, determine whether you are most effective when starting with easy or hard tasks first. What time of day do you tend to be most creative? What types of external environments do you have the easiest time focusing in? There are countless inputs that you can discover to determine the optimal working conditions for a given task. Depending on the nature of your work, you may have a different set of criteria for creative tasks vs analytical ones.

Time studies are also a helpful accountability tool here. They will help you identify patterns in your schedule where you are aligned to your goals and the times where you find yourself getting distracted.

Assess

At the end of the performance cycle, whether a specific project or annual review, it's time to honestly self-assess how you performed against the goals and expectations you had for yourself.

Because few things are ever black and white, we want honesty but not rigidity here. Perhaps things turned out different than you anticipated, but still yielded positive results. Acknowledge both sides of that. You can acknowledge that you did not anticipate the outcome but that it was still favorable.

On the other hand, if things went poorly, reflect on that as well. You don't want to dwell here, but give yourself time to really think through and understand what went wrong and what you can do to deliver better results on the next phase or effort. The length and depth of that reflection will be proportionate to the scale of the performance itself.

Assessing your own performance in real time is a behavior that your team will notice. It reinforces the culture of personal accountability that will eventually raise the performance of the entire team.

Thank you for reading. My hope is always that you've found something helpful and easy to implement. If you have feedback, suggestions or questions, please reply to this email.

If you are interested in exploring one-on-one coaching to transform your leadership, email me at [email protected] and we’ll coordinate a free, one-hour discovery session.

This week’s action items:

1. What is the biggest project you are currently working on? Identify the primary goal for the current phase of that project.

2. Identify someone you trust and ask them to serve as a mutual accountability partner.

3. Identify one working behavior or tendency this week that you can begin using to your advantage.

4. At the end of your next project, assess your performance against the goals you identified. Look at both the wins and the opportunities.