6 Great Reasons to Hold Your Employees Accountable

We are working on several coaching projects where managers are having a difficult time holding their team members accountable. When we ask these leaders why they don’t hold employees accountable to do the things they are responsible to do and in the timeframe they have set for accomplishment, some of the common excuses include:

1. They are too busy getting the operational parts of their job done and have not had the time to sit down and coach and counsel the employee.
2. Their schedule has not aligned with the employee’s schedule. Both the manager and employee have had vacations or scheduled PTO and it has been hard to find a good time.
3. So much time has passed since the issue with the lack of accountability occurred that the leader feels like it would be inappropriate to bring up the problem now.
4. The manager does not see the problem as that big of an issue but peers and direct reports are not happy with the employee’s performance in the areas of communication, collaboration and cross-departmental teamwork and have voiced their concerns to the manager.
5. The manager has not been honest with the employee in the past and did not share their concerns with the employee in one-on-one meetings or in their performance review.
6. The employee is well liked by the leader’s boss and every time the manager has tried to coach the employee in the past, they ran to the manager’s boss and complained about the poor treatment from the manager.
7. The manager and the employee are friends and they don’t want to hurt the employee’s feelings.

Although each one of these reasons sounds legitimate to the manager we are coaching, all of them are excuses that undermine both the success of the leader and the organization. We have written previous blogs on how to coach an employee and hold them accountable. This blog is focused on the most important reasons why leaders need to power through their excuses, lean into conflict and be accountable to hold their direct reports accountable to being a great team player who has a reputation for high quality, on-time performance in their job. Here are 6 reasons we hope will motivate you to raise your bar on accountability.

Bad Reputation: There are only two types of reputations; good ones and bad ones. When you do not hold all members of your team accountable, you develop a bad reputation as a leader.

Lack of Respect: One of the responsibilities of your job is to hold all members of your team accountable. When you do not do your job, you lose the respect of your team. Your initial thoughts may be that the accountable team members are the ones who lose respect for you. You are correct, but that is not all; the team member who is not doing their job does not respect you either or they would be doing their job and making you look like a great leader.

Lower Results: When the members of your team are not accountable, your department/branch results suffer and that negatively impacts the results of the organization.

Conflict Increases: When team members don’t do what they are supposed to do, it negatively impacts others in the organization, including you. When people are negatively impacted by an employee who is either not producing quality, on-time, work, or they are not a good team player to work with, almost always people are going to come and directly or indirectly tell you that you are not doing your job (holding your team accountable).

Unhappy Team Members: When you do not hold people accountable, no one is happy. This includes the team member who goes to bed each night knowing they are not doing their job and are letting fellow team members down, as well you and everyone else on the team that have to deal with the fallout.

You Hate Your Job: When team members do not do what we pay them to do and you do not hold them accountable, you are guaranteed to have more long-term stress in your life. When stress continues over long periods of time, most people start to dislike their job and especially coming to work and having to look at someone they are not holding accountable.

That is it in a nutshell. If you want to have a lousy reputation as a leader who is not respected, producing poor results, with unhappy team members who thrive in conflict and stress; if you want to hate your job, then you now know the formula…don’t hold your employees accountable.