Accountability in your organization is setting and holding everyone to the expectations of your business’ vision, values, and milestones.
When everyone follows through on promises, doesn’t blame others for mistakes, and supports others in achieving goals, it creates a healthy and positive work culture. As a result, this ignites motivation and trust within your organization and enhances productivity among your employees. Not only does this teach your employees to value and take pride in their work, but it also explains how their work fits into the bigger picture.
INSPIRING HIGHER STANDARDS
To scale your business to a level beyond your competition, you need to reach and sustain superior results by instilling high expectations across your organization. As a business owner, you need to hold everyone accountable for their commitments and alignment with your business’s high-level vision. High expectations turn into an unrelenting presence, driving people to hold themselves and each other accountable, and raising your standards will stimulate enhanced creativity and innovation within your organization.
The most effective leaders raise standards by treating each individual as if they have already arrived at their better self. In other words, you treat them as if they are ready and willing to take more ownership and responsibility for their performance. When coming from a place of trust, high expectations make people feel valued and engaged and positively impact organizational performance.
IF ACCOUNTABILITY IS MEASURED, IT CAN BE SCALED
While accountability should weave into your core values and vision, you must have a way to measure accountability to quantify and manage performance within your organization. As a business owner, you need to routinely monitor the critical results and outputs, validate those results with big picture targets and initiate action if action is required.
ACCOUNTABILITY MEASURED IN KPI’S
Key Performance Indicators (KPI) is a quantifiable value that measures an organization’s success in achieving its business objectives. KPI’s should be defined across all organizational dimensions both on the department level and individual level. Your business is only as good as your people and their performance. If you want to scale your business, you need to look for ways to scale your people’s performance.
Utilizing KPI’s for everyone in the organization holds everyone accountable for their performance and can motivate them to work more efficiently and exceed expectations. It can lead to your employees having a better work-life balance because it installs an ideology of working smarter and more efficiently to get the job done instead of working just for the sake of putting in time.
Assigning KPI’s for individuals must have the following characteristics: specific, measurable, relevant to the bigger picture, realistic and timely. It clearly states the individual’s role, the department, and the measurable outcomes that collectively contribute to your business’s higher-level goals.
Designate one or two key performance indicators (KPIs) for each accountability function by defining what your employee needs to be focused on a weekly, monthly, and quarterly. Decide on a handful of results, deliverables or outcomes accountable to each function. By having performance measured, you not only hold everyone accountable for their outputs, but you can diagnose where you have people and performance gaps that can be addressed to improve performance.
Signals from the future are all around you. Trends and competitors will often only give you part of the picture. And, if you’re only following what your competitors are doing, you risk missing something really important. You need a contextual frame that goes beyond the competitive landscape.
Understanding your context will give you a clear picture of today’s trends and weak signals that will shape tomorrow. This kind of contextual assessment includes understanding market trends, emerging technologies, rules and regulations, economic climate, customer needs, competitors, and even uncertainties. It’s important to not think about these signals, trends, facts, and competitors within the scope of your current business. To really paint the picture you’ll need for the future, go wider than your business.
As a business owner or executive, you should look at major trends, such as significant changes in technology, distribution, product innovation, markets, and social developments around the country or world that might shake up not only the business but the entire industry.
Forget about the competitor down the street. Is there a company on the other side of the globe that might put you out of business? Is there a new technology that could lead to an overnight change in the way companies in your industry might do business? These are the kinds of questions the strategic thinking team must explore.
Who are the nascent competitors? What are you uncertain about that might affect your future context? A global pandemic? Buying behaviour, technology?
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