5 things you need to do to hold your people accountable

I have the privilege of helping hundreds of businesses every year and one of the biggest issues that they deal with is holding their people accountable for progress and performance.

Accountability is one of the major pillars of effective business execution. It’s not about your people working hard or being busy. It’s about everyone doing the right things that will move their area of the business forward - in line with the company’s strategic priorities.

This is a summary of a great article by Stephen Lynch, the Chief Operations Officer of RESULTS.com, on how you hold your people accountable. (read the full article here)

Here are the 5 things that you need to get right

1. Have the Company strategic priorities and your staffs individual priorities visible to them everyday.

2. Confront reality every week and keep progress visible by displaying the companies Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s).

3. Identify the key functional roles in the business and ensure only one person is assigned the accountabilty for each role and one person is not accountable for too many roles.

4. Everyone should know how they are performing so ensure every role has one objective number that measures their performance. Be disciplined in tracking this number and make it visible every week.

5. Accountability has to mean consequences if your people do not deliver performance. Ensure your people know what the consequences are or the rewards for achieving them. Are your people being held accountable for meeting the performance standards required in their role?

The discipline of holding people accountable for meeting performance standards every week drives effective strategic execution. (click here for the full article)

Are your people being held accountable for meeting the performance standards required in their role?

If you want to learn more on how to hold your people accountable check out the next RESULTS.com Webinar (click here for more details)

Replying sensibly to emails

I have spend the weekend reviewing sales letters and emails for companies and 1 thing has become quite evident in doing so.

People often provide far to much detail and don't really consider who they are sending their sales letter or email to.

golden rule of emails is your reply should reflect the original message size. ie if it is a few short words reply in a few short words. If it is 3 paragraphs provide enough detail to mirror the length of the email.

Try and understand behaivioral profiles of who you are conversing with before you reply.

Core Values

I was in a consultation with a company and we were discussing Values. Values are the biggest driver of peoples behaviour and every issue with people I guaranteed he could trace back to his company values.

I Challenged him pretty hard and until he understood that until all the people in his business knew the values how could their behaviour reflect them consistently. He asked if all my staff knew ours and I said yes.

He came out of the office and went up to one of my staff and asked "do you know your company values?" She said yes and he asked "what are they?".

Without skipping a beat she rattled them off like a pro!

It was fantastic and a moment that made me extremely proud – great to have a culture where our values are so alive! One of our values is "Live what we Teach"

Imagine what would happen in your business if all of your people could do that?

Before their behaivior can reflect them, do you really know what they are?

hint - they should never include the words honesty or integrity - tomorrow I will tell you why