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How to hold yourself accountable: 5 tips

By Darren Finkelstein
By Darren Finkelstein

The Accountability Guy®

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Accountability has been an excellent stepping stone for building a solid relationship at work, delivering high standards of performance and revenue, and improving responsible behaviour. The key to attaining accountability is starting with responsible behaviour at work, ensuring that you are answerable for your actions and decisions, and thinking proactively instead of reactively. We have learned how accountability encourages employee engagement, motivation, and commitment. And when we talk about results, we see a sharp and gradual shift towards success. We will start discussing the five tips for being accountable regularly. What is self-accountability, and why is it important?

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What is self-accountability, and why is it important?

Self–accountability is being responsible, feeling empowered to take the right decisions and actions, acquiring proactive thinking instead of reactive, and building strong team relationships. It is more to deal with self-discipline and ensure that you know about your emotional reaction and how to control it as you face any conflict. So, you have strengthened and regulated your emotional equation and slowed down on the negative feelings that you might be feeling. If you hit rock bottom, you must stand up for your mistakes and not start blaming others. That’s where self-discipline comes into action. So you have to set great examples in front of other team members. 

Accountability is necessary because it makes you self-aware, self-disciplined, and a proactive thinker. 

  • Self–awareness: As you become self-aware, you will learn to improve your actions and decisions. The employee learns to accept the emotional self and then knows to make better decisions and work on relationships at work.
  • Self-Discipline: Self-discipline will help you feel more settled as you will reduce all the negative feelings from your mind and be able to set goals more rationally.
  • Proactive Nature: Proactive thinker adds a more positive attitude as you proactively learn to manage your challenges. You can plan for difficult situations before it arises. You will have solutions beforehand. That way, your managers and team members will appreciate you for your recommendable work and problem-solving abilities. This way, you will be able to set a good example for your team workers, and they will learn to respect and learn from you.

When you and your team members earn each other’s respect, then you learn to build better relationships, and then you know to work with each other. Employees will be able to learn from each other, and they will learn to improve faster. The performances will begin to improve. Employees will be able to take criticism positively and learn to improve from their mistakes. Finally, let’s discuss how we can learn to hold ourselves accountable daily.  

How to hold yourself accountable: 5 tips

  1. Start small: No one is perfect, and you can adapt the good practices from day one. So, change your habits one by one. Let the habits grow in your slowly.
  2. Set goals: Set short-term and smaller goals. Let these goals be realistic, and ensure you try to meet them. Goals should be measurable and timetable so that you practice actionable accountability.
  3. Schedule: Create a plan for yourself and your team. Learn to manage your time well. Make sure you can complete your tasks on time as per the schedule.
  4. Reward yourself: Rewarding is one of the vital steps when you want to improve. When you know that you have completed the tasks and met your goals, you must learn to reward yourself. You will remain motivated to look after future tasks and goals.
  5. Criticism: If you wish to improve, you must accept the feedback positively. Speak to your managers as frequently as possible. Learn from your mistakes, see the areas of improvement, and learn to work on them.

Conclusion

Once you become self-aware and self-disciplined, you learn to control your emotions better and channel them in the right direction. Accountable employees are more dedicated to work and towards their and teams’ performance. They learn to develop in their roles faster, giving better results to the organizations. They will regularly demonstrate and accept accountability and then understand the relational nature of success. It is a sustainable growth path or a road map for individuals, teams, and organizations. They learn to be adaptable to changes and remember to be more innovative toward meeting their targets. The group learns to collaborate and learn about each other strengths and weaknesses. They know to adopt good habits from each other. As a team, they will be more empowered to perform better. The team will learn to transform well, demonstrating that they have adapted the concept of accountability.

Finally, the employees and the teams are empowered to make decisions, stand up for their failures, and learn from them. Self-accountability can lead to all these improvements and can make individuals more responsible. But learn to take smaller steps to improve on a regular basis.