January 03, 2016
Many of today’s supervisors are blending a balance of direction led leadership vs. employee feedback led leadership. Leading others comes with many challenges but one of the hardest challenges is how to get employees to hold themselves accountable even if the supervisor, team leader or manager is already doing a good job.
Having employees hold themselves accountable is a great way to get leadership, drive and goals met from the employee without having the supervisor do all the accounting for the work.
How do you get employees to hold themselves accountable? Here are 2 quick tips that you should try:
1. Have the employee review the previous month’s work and have them set one challenging priority that they feel would help them feel successful.
a. Having the employee set their own goals has been well documented as a great leadership tool all the way to worst way to get employees to find ways to sandbag. Meet in the middle on this one and try it. Have goals set ahead of time but start the meeting off by asking the employee to document the first goal they would like to meet. Have them justify the goal and justify if the goal is reasonable. Have the employee give you an update half way through the month as to the goals progress. If they aren’t achieving it, help the employee, there is nothing worse than the feeling of “I told you so.” Having employees know you have their back is a secondary benefit to this tip of getting employees to holding themselves accountable. If the goal is achieved, continue to have them set a goal each month, an employee will naturally make it harder for themselves and having you push them will help them understand accountability.
2. Get to the point. Give the employee the ability to make the decision.
a. Many times I have had a discussion with employees about certain expectations that need to be met and ultimately the employee has already had the capacity to make the decision. However, the babble and over talking kill the moment. Save yourself the time and speech and just get to the point and then allow the employee to make the ultimate decision
i. A good example of this is when an employee had a rash of excuses for why goals would not be able to be met. Instead of discussing the goals and why they are important, just give them employee the facts. Goals are to be met in order for the business to be successful. Next, just ask the question. “What are two or three reasonable ideas that would help you hit your goals? Then just wait for their answer. Most to all of the time, the employee’s requests are reasonable and immediately actionable. Give the employee a recap… “If I accommodate to these, you are saying you will hit your goals?”
Both of these quick options give the employee the accountability without a lot of effort on the leader’s part. Employees want to be empowered and leaders want to achieve metrics that are set from above. Meshing of these two expectations is a great way to accomplish both.