The Costs When No One is Held Accountable

OK leaders, I’m counting on you to have done the work to address the last profitability killer we looked at, The Cost of Confusion, by taking the steps to set clear expectations for your teams. Even with the most detailed explanation though, we’re not likely to see our team members meet or exceed those expectations - at least not over the long haul - if we don’t have a culture of accountability. With that in mind the next profitability killer we need to work through will address the costs our businesses have to eat when no one is held accountable!

Accountability covers a fairly broad range; we each hold ourselves to a certain standard, we’re all accountable to the rule of law within the society we’re a part of, and there’s inevitably a level of accountability for performance in the organization’s where we make our living. For our purposes here, I’m going to skip the personal accountability. If you’ve hung with me through each of the other profitability killers we’ve looked at so far, I expect you’ve got that well in hand. And as much as I’d like to jump on a soapbox about the importance of accountability for our actions in society, and how the lack thereof is a direct contributor to the decay we’re experiencing in the rule of law, that’s a fight for another day. What we will be digging into with both hands is how we can recognize when more accountability is needed within the teams we lead, what it costs us when we haven’t maintained accountability, and steps we can take to ensure accountability is a vital part of our culture. First though, let’s make sure we’re singing from the same sheet of music with regards to why this even matters…

In an article called Holding People Accountable: Where Most Leaders Fail, Shannon Howard shared this from the CEO Benchmarking Report done by The Predictive Index:

Holding people accountable is difficult—even for leaders who head up companies. Eighteen percent of the CEOs we surveyed cited “holding people accountable” as their biggest weakness. Additionally, 15 percent struggle with “letting go of underperformers.”

If we consider either of those groups by themselves, I believe we could easily brush over them as not being that big of a deal. But if we add the two together (one-third of the CEOs they surveyed) and we keep in mind that they should be the most developed leaders in their respective organizations, is it likely that there’s an even higher percentage of folks in other supervisory or management roles within their companies who struggle even more to hold their teams accountable? Since that’s one of those rhetorical questions, let’s push on with why that’s a problem!

Howard went on to share this as to how this impacts a business:

When accountability is lacking, performance, company culture, and morale suffer. When employees are not held accountable for missed deadlines, bad behavior, or poor performance, a leader’s credibility is damaged and loyalty from their team wavers. This ultimately impacts the leader’s ability to inspire high-performing, winning teams.

One of the most common things I’ve heard a supervisor or manager say, once they finally had all they could stand and decided to address unacceptable behavior, has been along the lines of “You’ve done this for the last time and I’m not going to stand for it anymore!” While it is indeed their job to address poor behavior, the most common response I’ve heard goes something like this, “If what I’ve been doing has been so bad, why didn’t you say anything before now? I thought you didn’t mind…”

Let’s be honest, most of us have heard a dialog like that between parents and their children just as often as we have in the workplace - and the results aren’t all that different when there’s no consistency in accountability. All those times we (as parents or leaders) choose to look the other way when expectations aren’t being met, we’ve in fact endorsed that behavior as acceptable. This certainly damages our credibility and it will be a source of frustration to anyone around who is holding themselves to a higher level of accountability, but it also comes with a price tag so next time we’ll detail some of the specific costs an organization faces when no one is held accountable!