5 Ways To Demonstrate Leadership Accountability

By Darren Finkelstein
By Darren Finkelstein

The Accountability Guy®

Home » Accountability » 5 Ways To Demonstrate Leadership Accountability
Confident lady business trainer coach leader give flip chart presentation consulting clients teaching employees training team people speaking explaining strategy at marketing workshop concept

Accountability is when you reliably deliver on your commitments and do what you say you will do. As a leader, you also demonstrate accountability by taking ownership for your actions and decisions to transform effort into results. You also demonstrate leadership accountability by taking ownership of the team’s outcomes.

You might be wondering how you can demonstrate leadership accountability successfully. It’s simple. You merely need to show it through your behaviors and quality of decision-making. As an accountable leader, you need to set performance standards that others around you should want to emulate.

If you’re stuck on how to demonstrate leadership accountability, read this blog. It will tell you the top five ways to demonstrate leadership accountability.

Accountability quick images
HOW ACCOUNTABLE ARE YOU?

Discover your Accountability Score and increase the probability of smashing your GOALS and Getting Sh!t Done!

What is Accountability?

Accountability is the gold standard and the mark of a good leader. It holds leaders to a high standard of quality in behavior and decision-making. Accountability at its basic level is taking ownership of your action.

It is also about setting SMART goals, planning, prioritizing, and executing actions to achieve your dreams and aspirations. Without accountability, your organization will stoop into anarchy and chaos.

Leadership accountability is the key to success in an organization. It is what motivates everyone else in the company to hold themselves accountable. In the end, you’ll have an organization where there is trust and growth because you demonstrated leadership accountability.

Top 5 Ways to Demonstrate Leadership Accountability

Now that you know that leadership accountability is the key to an organization’s success, here are five ways to demonstrate it.

Exude Leadership Accountability, So You Are Leading By Example

As a leader, you need to demonstrate accountability through actions, words, decision-making, and performance. You need to ensure you do what you promise you will do.  Essentially, the key to leadership accountability lies in leading by example.

You need to exhibit the following behavior to be the pacesetter for accountability:

  • You need to be disciplined and stay on top of your goals and action. You must ensure you don’t procrastinate or get distracted by competing desires and priorities. You must create a plan of action and stick to it
  • Ensure you display integrity. This means you need to be honest about delivering on your commitments. Plus, you need to have the virtue of apologizing if something goes wrong.
  • The key to leadership accountability also lies in executing your commitments. This involves mastering new behaviors and skills to strive to achieve excellence in the way you execute your tasks.

Build Understanding Amongst The Various Individuals In Your Team

Part of leadership accountability involves understanding the individuals in your team. It consists of understanding your team members’ expectations and the resources, support, and tools they have available to display accountability.

Your leadership accountability can be complete only if you build an understanding and help them realize the pitfalls of overcommitting and under-delivering.  You can build individual understanding in your team in the following ways:

  • Mentorship and coaching to help your team individuals to learn and observe behaviors that help demonstrate accountability
  • Have assessments to show how the individual’s accountability impacts others
  • Have team meetings to understand the progress of everyone’s accountabilities.

Create Accountable Leaders

You can demonstrate leadership accountability by creating accountable leaders in your organization. It becomes easier to create accountable leaders when they have the necessary skills and competencies to help them understand what being accountable does for the organization.

You need to include accountability into your leadership program and ensure your team learns to deliver on commitments and realizes the importance of being trustworthy and reliable in other eyes.

Leadership accountability, when created, ensures you have managers that learn to set clear expectations and hold people responsible for the results they have committed to.

Communicate

Leadership accountability can only be demonstrated if you communicate with clarity, conciseness, and comprehensively. As a leader, you must share information and knowledge with your team to enable them to display accountability.

Not only do you need to display and demonstrate actions and behaviors of accountability, but you also need to tell your team how to do it. Guidance, mentorship, and advising are great ways in which your team will learn leadership accountability.

Require Accountability

Ultimately, leadership accountability involves requiring accountability from every individual in the team. It is about getting your team to understand the importance of accountability in the organization and ensuring they know the need to demonstrate accountability.

You need to ensure you set clear expectations and make sure your team can commit and do justice to those goals.

Wrapping up

Leadership accountability ensures you meet your commitments and emulate a high standard of behavior and decision-making skills that others can emulate. You demonstrate leadership accountability by leading by example, communicating, building understanding, creating accountable leaders, and requiring accountability.

Essentially, leadership accountability is about setting and establishing SMART goals, communicating them effectively, and ensuring your team has the wherewithal to achieve their goals. You also need to be a provider and accepter of constructive criticism to be an accountable leader.

If you still have problems establishing leadership accountability in your organization, it is time to call the experts, TickThoseBoxes. They will show you step-by-step how to achieve leadership accountability and ensure others meet it too.