Workplace Culture Leadership: The Importance of Holding Employees Accountable

Feb 15, 2024

Inspiring Culture Leaders are Accountable and They Hold Their Employees Accountable

Several years ago, I had the pleasure of visiting Beryl Health, a 24/7 call center based in Bedford, Texas. Beryl prides itself for embracing a family-first, fun workplace culture that is known for their amazing customer service. They hire for attitude and they engage in a lot of fun workplace rituals and traditions. The human resources manager even had the alternative job title, “The Queen of Fun and Laughter.”

Now don’t for a minute equate the idea of a “fun, family-friendly workplace” with having low standards. In my experience, organizations that are known for their humor-filled workplace cultures also have some of the highest standards for accountability.

One of the ways Beryl, for example, sustains such an amazing environment is by holding their employees accountable for their actions. If an employee starts acting in ways counter to their respectful, positive culture, they’ll talk to that employee and remind them of what the employee said during their job interview. “Chris, you told us when we hired you seven years ago – I’ve got your interview file right here – that you are, and I quote, ‘a people person.’ So, what happened!?”

And to help make sure employees are accountable for their behaviors and attitudes, everyone at Beryl learns their “3L philosophy.” If an employee doesn’t like something and starts griping about it, they are reminded of the 3 Ls:

Learn to live with it because it’s not going away.

Lobby to change it and of course we’ll consider a better approach.

Leave!

Yes, this positive, warm, and all-round-fuzzy workplace holds their employees accountable and tells them that as mature, responsible adults, ultimately if they really aren’t happy with something, well, they can leave!

Leadership is of course ultimately about taking ownership and responsibility for your own attitudes and behaviors. It’s about being accountable to not just your bosses, but the organization that you represent, your employees, your customers, your family, and especially to yourself. And this mindset of accountability creates a culture of accountability that permeates throughout the workplace.

If you aren’t responsible and accountable for your own attitudes and behaviors, then let me ask you this – who is? (You can’t blame everything on your dog, the weather, or your horoscope!)

You simply cannot build a collaborative team based on trust unless everyone takes responsibility – and that must begin with you as the leader. Taking responsibility and being accountable means:

Being aware of your emotional reactions to difficult situations and taking the time to thoughtfully respond and not just react in the moment.
Owning and learning from your mistakes.
Remembering that nobody owes you anything.
Saying sorry when you need to. The number of lawsuits, hurt feelings, and festering workplace conflicts that end up in mediation or court that could have been resolved if someone had just said, “I’m sorry” is staggering!
Leading by example. It’s that age-old adage, “Actions speak louder than words.” Take responsibility for your own actions, even when others around you are not. Scratch that – especially when the people around you are not.
Asking for help when you need it. A lot of leaders, particularly higher up the food chain you go, are afraid to ask for help for fear of how it will make them look. But asking for help is a sign of strength, never a sign of weakness, and it sends a powerful message to your employees when you are the first person to ask for help.
Building trust by being known as a leader who always does what they promised to do.
Owning the words you use. If you dash off an angry e-mail message or lose your cool in a meeting and say something you’re going to regret, sorry, but you can’t brush it off by saying, “I didn’t really mean that.” Well, I guess you can try saying that, but people will have a difficult time believing you. Take responsibility for the language you choose to use.
Being open to constructive feedback. We’ll come back to this later, but this is a big one. And hey, I get it! No one likes getting feedback however, a critical trait of an accountable leader is the willingness to accept feedback. How else can you learn and grow? How else can you be accountable to your team for your behaviors unless you’re open to feedback?

My friend David Katz describes being accountable in these terms: “When thinking about being accountable at work I always used the phrase, “no rock to hide behind.” If I screwed up at work, I didn’t look for somewhere to hide or some way to deflect. I stand on the rock. I own my mistake, and then together we figure out how to fix the problem and move on. That, to me, is part of accountability. And the sooner you own your mistake, the sooner you can take corrective action. Easy principle but tough to live by. Sometimes I had to remind myself to quit looking for the rock.”

Now these accountability reminders don’t just apply to you as the leader. In your role as a leer leading leaders, you need to coach your employees to embrace the same accountability mindset.

One way for you to encourage a culture of accountability is to make use of active rather than passive employee engagement surveys.

Here’s the challenge with traditional employee engagement surveys: Passive questions, like those asked in most employee engagement surveys, let employees off the hook too easily. They offload all (or at least most) of the responsibility for their happiness and success onto your broad shoulders.

A traditional, passive question such as, “Do you have clear goals at work?” makes it easy for an employee to rate that question as a 4 out of 10, sending the message that their supervisor is lousy at goal setting. It shifts all the responsibility off their shoulders and places it onto their boss’s.

Now, to be clear, you do, as a leader, have a disproportionate impact on the engagement factors in the workplace. My point here is that you need to create a culture where employees also accept accountability for their role.

This is where active questions come in. An active question that requires employees to step up and be more accountable would be, “Did I do my best to set clear goals or clarify my goals with my supervisor this month?”

Instead of the passive, “Are you happy in your job?” ask employees, “Did I do my best to be happy at work this quarter?”

Or ask employees, “Did I do my best to build positive relationships at work?” or “Did I do my best to be a positive, supportive team member?”

Research from coaching guru Marshall Goldsmith has shown that people are far more successful at making improvements in both their work and personal lives when they use active questions like these that are linked to a daily scoreboard to track their progress.

Ultimately, being a leader who is known as someone who takes responsibility and holds themselves to a high standard of accountability will earn you enormous respect and help you leave behind a lasting leadership legacy.

Michael Kerr is a dynamic international Hall of Fame speaker who writes and speaks about inspiring workplace cultures, inspiring leadership, and businesses that put humor to work to dive outrageous results. He is the author of 9 books, including The Jerk-Free Workplace, The Humor Advantage, and Small Moments, Big Outcomes: How Leaders Create Cultures That Drive Extraordinary Results.