Evidence Of Accountability

In the end, personal and organizational accountability mean accepting full responsibility for achieving results, i.e., Do It. If you don’t complete the Do It step, you never reap the most valuable benefit of full accountability: overcoming your circumstances and achieving the results you want. Regardless of the many benefits that accrue from applying the other three Steps To Accountability—See It, Own It, and Solve It—results only come when you put all four steps together. That’s the real evidence of accountability.

Recently, the senior leadership team of a midsize manufacturing company started questioning whether they would be able to achieve the Key Results they’d committed to achieve six months earlier. They believed they could achieve their profit goal because of a spike in sales at the beginning of the year, but they had serious doubts about achieving their operating expense goal. Revenues had declined steadily since the first of the year, while operating expenses had increased. After much debate about whether operating expenses should be cut to meet the Key Results or be maintained at current levels to preserve the company’s future, the CEO took a hard stand. “If we ‘cave-in’ on our Key Results when times are tough, we’ll never build the Culture Of Accountability we want and need. Not meeting our operating expense goal is not an option. We have to make the hard choices about what to spend and what to cut. Our Key Results matter, and we have to keep asking ‘What else can we do?’ in order to achieve them.” The debate was over. Members of the senior leadership team agreed to do what was necessary to meet their operating expense target for the year.

That’s right, Do It means embracing full responsibility for results and remaining answerable for progress toward those results regardless of your prevailing circumstances. Sometimes hard choices have to be made to achieve results. Remember, evidence of accountability lies in the achievement of results, short-term and long-term.

To learn more about Creating A Culture Of Accountability in your organization, we invite you to join the Accountability Community by visiting www.partnersinleadership.com, where you can review actual client case studies.

Steps To Accountability, See It, Own It, Solve It, Do It, Culture Of Accountability, Creating A Culture Of Accountability, and Accountability Community are all registered trademarks of Partners In Leadership, Inc.