Leading Accountability—Take Responsibility

Let me share an example of what it means to take responsibility. The ancient Romans had a tradition. Whenever one of their engineers constructed an arch, as the capstone was hoisted into place, the engineer assumed accountability for his work in the most profound way possible. He stood under that arch.

Now, this illustrates what we mean by taking responsibility. We answer personally for the outcome, positive or negative. It's easy to accept responsibility when we have good outcomes and bask in the success, but only if we accept responsibility for all outcomes are we truly accountable.

Employees must understand that learning from mistakes and from negative outcomes helps us to grow and become more capable and successful. They need a safe environment for this learning. This environment is created when you have a culture of trust.

In his book, Five Dysfunctions of a Team, author Patrick Lencioni introduces the concept of vulnerability-based trust. When you have vulnerability-based trust, you are willing to accept responsibility, good or bad, because you trust that others will understand and support you. When you have this, you hear statements like, "I could sure you some help," or, "I take responsibility," or "I thought I had that solved, but obviously I didn't," or, "I could really use some ideas on how to handle this."

As a leader, you can help create this vulnerability-based trust and therefore accountability for taking responsibilities in ways such as being sure to keep yourself and your people from working in the blame zone, giving honest and open feedback to others, and listening with an open mind to feedback from others, exploring what happened with both positive and negative outcomes to identify lessons learned for the future.

Now, if those outcomes are negative, admit your own part in the results. If the outcomes are positive, be generous in recognizing and giving credit for success.

When you help people take responsibility, you build a strong culture of accountability. This is a goal of all effective leaders.