240: Accountability Starts With The Leader

<p>Holding our people accountable is one of the basics of being a leader. They flounder, deadlines pass unheeded, things get missed, work is not completed to a satisfactory standard.  Why is that?  People are not trying to fail in their jobs, but they do let the team down with their poor performance and lack of accountability.  What can we do about it?</p> <p> </p> <p>As the leader we have to start with ourselves. The most crucial resource we have is our time and how we choose to use it.  If we are poor time managers, then we apply unnecessary stress to our own lives and those of our colleagues.  We show up with unreasonable turnaround times for work, because we were not properly organised.  We become very stressed and that spreads like an epidemic across the team. Our stress immediately impacts our mood control and our mood can lighten or darken the workplace within seconds.</p> <p> </p> <p>We are time poor because we haven't done a good enough job on defining our priorities.  We are also rushing around because we are doing too much.  The reason we are so busy is because we are unable to delegate our work properly.  We tried it once, there were errors, problems, rework and we decided, "it is faster if I do it myself". This is false economy, because we can't do everything by ourselves.  We need to gain leverage from accessing the full power of the team.  Delegation is also an important driver of career development for our successors.  By giving them some of our tasks, we can start to groom them for higher things.</p> <p> </p> <p>In large companies, promotions are often decided by boards.  It is beneficial to be able to say you have been doing a number of delegated asks for the leader of the section and have been successfully operating at that level in the current position.</p> <p> </p> <p>The reason why we think delegation doesn't work is because we have been doing it the wrong way.  Done correctly, it can help us to use our time for those tasks that only we can perform.  One of them is coaching our people.  Lead