Managers struggle trying to figure out how to hold people accountable around activity, behavior, performance, and results because they’re asking the wrong person, when all they have to do is ask the coachee.
- “How can I be your accountability partner in a way that sounds supportive and not like I’m micromanaging you?”
- “If you don’t follow through with the commitments you make, how do you want me to bring this to your attention?”
While these questions focus on having the person set up the rules of accountability so you avoid costly assumptions around how they want to be held accountable, what if you notice someone slipping back into their old, damaging, or unproductive ways in the moment?
How can you positively bring this to their immediate attention to build awareness and instill daily accountability in less than 30 seconds, without them having a negative, or resistant reaction that could damage trust, or dismissing what you said?
Create a reciprocated Accountability Partnership.
For this to work you need to first:
👉Determine their goals.
👉Identify the company’s, as well as the person’s core values.
While it’s essential to define the core values that both you and your company want to live by, unfortunately, once these values are created, they’re put on a shelf or website for marketing purposes.
But what if you can use your company and personal values as an accelerated way to immediately let people know they’re reverting to unproductive behavior? Here’s what the accountability partnership sounds like.
“What I want for you is to honor your values, goals, and priorities so you can achieve what matters most to you. Of course, I want to ensure I’m doing the same, while best supporting you. To support each other in a way that we both achieve our goals while honoring the values most important to us, let’s create an accountability partnership.
What this means is, any time either you or I fail to honor our values or fall into any ineffective or damaging behavior that can impact our personal brand, productivity, and goals, we both have permission to immediately point this out to each other so we can ensure we shift back to honoring our core values and doing what’s best for us, our team, and our company.
Are you open to creating this type of partnership to accelerate our success?”
Creating a mutual accountability partnership builds trust and allows you to provide immediate feedback or call people out in the moment, without having to worry about violating trust, hurting relationships, or be seen as a micromanager because they now understand your positive intent and the value of this agreement.
#coaching #management #accountability #sales
