Accountability is critical to creating an effective and successful team, but you can’t just throw random people together in a department or project group and expect them to be accountable to one another. That is why team accountability teambuilding activities can be so important to creating a strong team that trusts one another to fulfil their duties when it matters.
What is accountability?
Accountability is an obligation to account for your activities, accept responsibility for them and be open about the results of your activities. Accountability depends on reliability as you need to be reliable in order to do the activities you are accountable for.
In order to build trust in a group, you must establish reliability and accountability between the members so each person is willing to act reliably and be accountable if she does something wrong, just as she knows the other people in the group are reliable for their responsibilities and will be held accountable if something goes wrong on their end.
Why accountability matters in business
People tend to look at things from their own perspective and not see how they will directly affect others. That’s why they often don’t think it matters if they show up to work 10 minutes late or finish their report two days behind schedule. When you introduce the concept of accountability to co-workers, you help make them realise that what they do doesn’t just affect them, but can drag their whole team down too.
For example, when someone working a shift job shows up 10 minutes late, he/she forces the person who worked the shift before him/her to stay 10 minutes late, which could cause big problems for their co-worker if they had anything important scheduled after their shift. Similarly, when someone completes a report two days late, his boss, who was relying on the report in order to complete a presentation offering suggestions for the company’s next move, now has two fewer days to compile their presentation and may even have to reschedule the presentation.
It’s important for workers to recognise that when they do not act reliably, they are putting the burden on the entire team, not just themselves, and when they do that, they need to hold themselves accountable. This is why everyone in the team needs to strive to avoid mistakes and maximise their performance and productivity so everyone in the team can successfully achieve their goals. And when someone fails the rest of the team, they need to be accountable and take responsibility for their failure, whether that means fixing the mistake, telling a manager or taking some other action to help prevent the blowback from affecting their team members.