How to Hold Your Team Accountable with Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask Ready to Lead

Leading from a place of empathy and accountability isn’t easy, but it’s the only way to get the results you want.
How the heck do I hold my team accountable? It’s literally the number one question leaders ask. And it often comes with a tone of frustration and annoyance with the team. When leaders ask that question, they’re pointing fingers, but they need to shift the mirror a little bit and take a deeper look. 
In today’s episode of the Ready to Lead Podcast, co-hosts Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask turn the mirror on themselves as leaders and ask: Have I created an environment where clear accountability is the norm? Or are there ambiguities, inconsistencies, and miscommunications between me and my team? In Jeff’s experience, 90% of accountability issues go away when we apply the following model.
 
3 Keys to Winning
The three keys to winning are easy to remember because they all start with the same word, and they all rhyme.
Clarity of role Clarity as a whole Clarity of goals
 
Let’s start with clarity of role. Is each person’s role super clear? Do they know their responsibilities? Do they know what success looks like and by when? It seems elementary, but so often we hire someone and never have that foundational conversation about their responsibilities, what success looks like, and the timeframe.
Then we move on to clarity as a whole. As a team, how do we work together? How do we pass the baton back and forth, both intra- and inter-departmentally? When people know who’s doing what, it’s much more clear how we operate together, in our own department and cross-functionally. When we don’t define things clearly—who owns what and when—then there are a lot of gray areas and finger-pointing.
The final key to winning is clarity of goals. This is all about clear milestones, rewards if necessary, and ultimately what success looks like. When we have all that clarity, then accountability conversations are easy to have. They get difficult when we haven’t done the groundwork to create clarity, and we’re all on different pages with different interpretations of what things mean.
Think of a 4x4 relay team. Each runner knows what their particular role is. They know what to do. They know what it needs to look like when they pass off the baton. They know what time they want to beat. And they know they want that gold medal. That’s clarity. 
 
Each Team Member Has to Understand the Why
When Richard starts a new company as an entrepreneur, it’s just one or two people, then a handful more, and it’s easy to be on the same page. You’re literally in the same room doing everything together. But then, as the team grows, it’s easy to assume everyone knows the why as your team widens, deepens, grows. But that’s a logical lie. 
People need to understand what you do, who you serve, the business model, and value creation as a whole. If they don’t understand that, they can’t possibly understand how they contribute to that value, individually or as a team.
If they know what they’re supposed to do, but they don’t know why, you might as well hire robots. A robot will continue to do that one thing even after it stops working. So will the employee who doesn’t understand why in the hell they’re doing what you asked them to do.
If they understand the why, they can come to you and say, “This isn’t working, and I researched it, and I think we should try this instead.”
 
Understanding the Kindness Counterfeit
What commonly happens is that leaders try too hard to be nice and slack off on accountability. What they’re really trying to do is maintain likeability. But ambiguity isn’t kindness; clarity is. Dancing around the truth,...