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How accountable are you?

How Leaders Demonstrate Accountability?

By Darren Finkelstein
By Darren Finkelstein

The Accountability Guy®

Home » Accountability » How Leaders Demonstrate Accountability?
Confident female leader, coach holding briefing for multiracial team employees in office, explaining business strategy, plan to subordinates. Businesswoman at company meeting with diverse colleagues.

Are you an entrepreneur, manager, or a person in a leadership role in an organization? You might want to be the first to understand and demonstrate accountability effectively. The key to demonstrating accountability is knowing that it takes ownership of your successes and failures without playing any blame game.

As a leader, you are accountable for your and your team’s professional and personal growth in the organization. So, you need to keep up the commitments and promises you made, and you are answerable for your and your team’s decisions and actions.

You might wonder how to demonstrate accountability and ensure the success of your organization, isn’t it? This blog will enlighten you.

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Demonstrating Accountability

Demonstrating accountability is no easy feat, but to be a leader and lead your organization to success, you need to demonstrate certain accountability skills.

Here are the accountability skills you need to demonstrate as a leader:

Establish Clear Goals and Targets

The foremost step to demonstrating accountability is establishing clear goals and targets in your organization. You need to ensure you develop SMART goals. This means you need to develop specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound goals.

Further, your goal needs to be clearly communicated, and they should feel relevant to your team as well. If your goals aren’t SMART, your team won’t be able to connect with them and achieve them. So, demonstrating accountability starts with expressing clear goals that are measurable and relevant.

You might need to set some Big Hairy Audacious Goals, too, for the long run of your organization. Ensure you set them as well. You demonstrate accountability when you set BHAG goals, as it shows you have a vision and mission.

Ask for Help When Needed

Demonstrating accountability also involves asking for help when you need it. Often while achieving your goals, you will face obstacles and hurdles that are unexpected. To wave through them successfully, you might feel like you can do it all on your own. However, even the best leaders need help.

You can demonstrate accountability by asking for help when you need it. The minute you see something going awry, ask your team or an outsider for help. You will be able to clear the hurdle easily and ensure you achieve your goals.

Asking for help demonstrates accountability as it shows your commitment to the organizational goals.

Focus on the Future State

An accountable leader doesn’t get overwhelmed with the obstacles and barriers that come in the way while achieving goals. Instead, they focus on the future state and the big picture.

More importantly, you demonstrate accountability by ensuring you have answers to questions like the big picture, how to get there, the specific steps, how to overcome the various obstacles, and much more.

You need to be able to have challenging goals and vision. As an accountable leader, you need to turn the challenging goal into a possibility. You can do it by breaking the goal into small pieces and arranging them in chronological order, and ticking them off on your to-do list as you achieve them.

Provide Honest and Constructive Feedback

You can be a truly accountable leader only when you empower your employees and team. You do this by providing them honest and constructive feedback. Demonstrating accountability also involves inculcating accountability in your team. You can do this by providing feedback.

Feedback lets your team know how they are performing. You ensure constructive feedback so that they can take actionable steps to improve or keep up the excellent work. You needn’t wait for a performance review for giving constructive and honest feedback. It should be done at the moment.

You demonstrate accountability by providing honest and constructive feedback as you empower your team so they feel confident of holding themselves accountable. Plus, you show your commitment to your goals.

Communicate

Another key to demonstrating accountability as a leader is to communicate. You need to ensure you have an open line of communication with your team and stakeholders. Your communication needs to have clarity, crispness, and coherence.

When you communicate with your team, you need to ensure you don’t miscommunicate anything. Another vital part of communication is to listen to your team empathetically and actively.

You display accountability by communicating because communication is what gives your team the resources it needs. Only when they have resources will they feel confident in holding themselves accountable.

Endnotes

Accountability isn’t something you take lightly. Without it, the organization will crumble and fail. So, as a leader, you need to demonstrate accountability and set an example for your team.

You can demonstrate accountability by ensuring you establish clear goals and targets. Plus, you demonstrate accountability by asking for help when you need it and focusing on the big picture. Most importantly, you demonstrate accountability by empowering your employees and team.

So, pull up your socks and start demonstrating and holding yourself accountable to ensure your organization’s success. If you need help in demonstrating accountability, you can contact TickThoseBoxes. They have the best tools and accountability coaches who will guide you in creating an accountable atmosphere and ensure you are on the path of accountability.