How important is accountability to the success of a company? Without it, a company cannot improve its performance. If each team member feels invested in the success of the business they are a part of, the sky is truly the limit.
As part of our business coach advice, let’s point out five clear benefits where accountability is implemented in a workplace:
- Improved performance of the firm as a whole
- Increased team involvement towards the firm achieving its targets and goals
- Increased commitment and follow through
- Heightened levels of creativity and innovation
- Improved team morale
Lessons of these 5 keys
These five benefits are linked together in many ways. For example, hitting an aggressive target will likely require some creative thinking and teams working together. When targets are achieved, morale is high. So this point is important to think about: if team members feel like they are achieving more, then partners should not worry about upsetting their team by upping the ante.
Some partners may believe that team members just turn up, do the job to bare minimum expectations and go home. However, this belief is not necessarily true. People want to succeed (as in, your team members), but too often they are limited in their ability to do so because they do not know what success means, they have no metrics to show them they are on the right path, and there is very limited accountability to encourage them.
Accountability Works
If you need empirical evidence that accountability is a good thing, check out the Hawthorne Effect, an experiment conducted at the Hawthorne Works, a Western Electric factory near Chicago, in the 1930s. The experiment was designed to figure out whether workers were more productive operating in bright light or dimmer light. Results were measured by observation – workers were aware someone was watching them. Interestingly, the results were inconclusive. Productivity levels were pretty constant regardless if the lights were dim or not. What changed the workers’ morale the most was when the experiment ended. The only logical conclusion to draw is that when workers are ‘watched,’ they perform better!
Creating an environment of measures and accountability makes it much simpler to look back, point to specific initiatives, meetings, conversations and corrective action taken in the moment (read, accountability!) and demonstrate how they were responsible for successful outcomes.
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Source: Colin Dunn