Driving Results Through Accountability Partners

Today we want to talk to you about Driving Results through Accountability Partners.

We all know the concept of an accountability partner, it’s somebody who we share our commitments with and we hope that they hold us accountable and responsible for executing what we said we would do.

I want to talk to you about some of the pitfalls of choosing the wrong accountability partners and give you couple of best practices for knowing who you should pick.

First of all, you should not pick your boss, and you should not pick your employees. If you have people who work for you or if you are working for someone, they may have your best intention at heart (or they may not), but you do not want them to be your accountability partner. You want your accountability partner to be someone at the peer level or someone outside of the organization.

Why? When people are writing your performance review, or you are writing someone else’s review, much as you would like to think you are able to, you are very unlikely to be able to completely ignore all the things they are trying to accomplish that they have told you about, that they are not succeeding at.

As an example, you might be writing a performance review for someone who is doing a pretty good job at work; they have also told you they are trying to lose weight and quit smoking, and because they failed at that, your perception of them is just a little lower than it might have been. And you are, if you are like most human beings, going to on some level, let that impact their review. That’s not really fair because at work they are being rated on their business performance, not on how they are doing at home.

We also don’t want you to pick a person who you are in competition with. So let’s talk about peers. If I have a peer that I competing with, either for resources, or I competing with for a promotion that is available in the company, that’s not a good accountability partner.

My accountability partner has to be someone who has my best interests at heart, number one, and also who has the courage to tell me when they think I am messing up or to challenge me when they think I am falling behind on something.

That puts the burden on me. I need to make it emotionally safe for people to challenge me when I am not keeping the commitments that I told them are important to me, (that’s what a coach does). So whether your accountability partner is a coach who you hire externally, or it’s someone who you work with as a peer, or it’s someone outside of the organization:

We recommend that you get one.

We recommend that you proactively publish your commitments and goals to that person.

And that you make them feel emotionally safe when they hold you accountable to what you said is important to you.

These are just a few of the ways you can drive accountability and results through accountability partners. We look forward to sharing ideas with you in the months to come.

In celebration of our tenth year and with the global success of our best-selling book “Winning With Accountability, The Secret Language of High Performing Organizations” (now in its eighth printing) we are offering you some of our best insights and practices to create an Accountability Culture in your workplace.

Want to know more about creating accountable cultures? Take our free assessment and buy the book here. http://www.dynamicresults.com/book/