Lacking ownership & accountability?
Questions to ask yourself and what can you do at your level.
Ownership and accountability are crucial for team success because they help to ensure that everyone is working towards the same goals.
It provides extraordinary benefits such as greater collaboration, better problem-solving and decision-making, increased adaptability, higher trust and overall motivation.
We may lack ownership and accountability when:
having a lack of clear expectations,
a lack of training and development,
inadequate feedback and coaching,
poor management or leadership,
inadequate incentives or rewards,
poor company culture,
personal problems or burnout,
lack of opportunities.
Let's start by asking these questions:
As a Salesperson, do you pro-actively engage with your partners and try your best to achieve your goals?
Do you feel empowered, motivated into owning your actions? Trying your things?
Do you prepare your own action plan?
Do you come prepared to your 1:1’s with solutions?
Do you track your action plan progress and act on it? Or wait for your manager?
Manager, how do you promote ownership & accountability?
What can Salespeople do?
Communicate more often and more clearly about your progress and roadblocks with your manager. On top of helping you moving forward, your manager will trust you more after a while.
Seek feedback: after having received a negative feedback on this from your manager, ask fore more concrete solutions to him/her.
Challenge your perspective with your internal buddy:
How would these person have handled the situation differently?
What would this person have done to demonstrate more ownership?
How far are you from a colleague that is considered a great owner & accountable person?
If the feedback was too generic from your manager, ask for concrete examples and clear expectations.
Connect with the why:
How does a given project or a task connects with your mission?
With your career goals?
With your skill development?
Put yourself in your manager’s shoes:
Would you have the same feedback?
Do you truly believe your did everything that was asked of you?
How would you have done differently when providing a feedback or communicating with yourself?
Learn to say no: do you lack ownership and accountability because the task was not appealing to you? It’s important to have an open conversation from day 1 on this.
Can you think about a situation:
in which you demonstrated great ownership?
How / why is this different?
And what can Managers do?
Clarify your 1:1 expectations: focus on having your team come with solutions, next steps.
Communicate and focus on clear inputs: what do you expect in term of prospect/clients interactions, which S.L.A.s?
Ask questions to help your team come-up with their solutions and own ideas, instead of you telling them what to do.
Leverage the F.B.I. methodology: provide clear examples of situations where you expected these actions and followup but your talent didn’t do this or this. Two main outcomes: (1) your communication was not clear and now it is or (2) your talent knowingly didn’t do those.
Lead by example: do you apply the same expectations to yourself? Think about your last conversations, projects, team meetings.
Your team might not see the why or importance of this: connect the why with their career goals, aspirations, career path.
Give them full autonomy on a given project, encourage team work and cross-team collaboration. Having in mind a final presentation/delivery in front of you + a key leader of the company (C-Level).
Remove yourself from the equation:
your team member(s) might rely too much on you.