Keeping Accountable at Work

Accountability: anything or anyone that helps us gain mental leverage to achieve the results we desire.

—The Accountability Stop

At my office, the leadership often talks about accountability. Granted, they mean it in the backward looking, “no one is held accountable,” sense that I dislike. But it still got me thinking, how do I view accountability at work? How do I stay accountable to “achieve the results I desire?”

First Things First

I’ve mentioned before that I love lists. I love to make a to-do list and cross items off. It’s more correctly categorized as a productivity technique. But for me, it’s the foundation of being accountable. I can’t start to understand how to achieve my results until I break down the goal into a task list. That breakdown helps me start to prioritize what needs to be done. 

Next I ask myself, “What’s the longest lead item that I have on my list?” Anything that needs input from several people, anything that must be completed by a person with specific expertise, or a combination of those, gets pushed to the front of the line. I have to start the ball rolling on these long lead-time tasks so they can be completed when I need them. I may set up a group meeting for several people to hear the same information and they can ask coordination questions. If a meeting would waste people’s time, I may summarize the information in an email copied to everyone involved.

Clean Your Plate

Next on my to do list, I look for anything that I can put into someone else’s court. What things can be handled by someone else? Part of my job as a project manager is to keep other people busy. Many times questions that arrive by email fall into this category. I find answers that are close at hand and respond to the sender so that it’s off my plate. If someone else needs to answer an email, I ship it off to them so that I’m not holding up the process of getting an answer. (I often add a note on my to-do list to follow up later with the person to whom I forwarded the email.)

See the Ball, Hit the Ball

Pushing things off your plate is sometimes easier said than done. Sometimes the emails come in torrents. Sometimes everyone wants everything all at once. At those times, I remember the phrase “see the ball, hit the ball.” It’s from Andre Agassi’s autobiography, Open. In Chapter 22, Agassi’s coach Brad Gilbert got fed up trying to be positive in the face of Agassi’s self-defeating attitude and unleashed a tirade of frustration: 

“Just hit it to the same place he hits it. If he hits a backhand crosscourt, you hit a backhand crosscourt. Just hit yours a little better. You don’t have to be better than the whole…world, remember? You just have to be better than one guy. There isn’t a shot he has that you don’t have … just hit … Just see the ball, hit the ball. Do you hear me, Andre? See the ball. Hit the ball.”

Perfect vs. Good

My point? In the words of Voltaire: “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” When we’re inundated with requests, sometimes our reaction is to shut down because we want it all to be answered perfectly. It may be that I just need to get to “good-enough” right now. That might be a quick acknowledgement of an email from an important client with an estimate of how long it might take me to get back to them. But I keep hitting the balls back.

I realize after writing all of this that I didn’t mention any of the personal accountability techniques that we’ve previously discussed! Certainly they apply in big and small ways every day in our work lives: deadlines, accountability groups, meetings, public and sometimes internet accountability, and of course the job itself. For this article, I wanted to attack more of the nuts and bolts of daily accountability.

In terms of what is truly motivating me, I have what may be considered old-school mental leverage for doing my job: I want to continue to get paid, not be fired and go hungry. But to get the results that the company and I both want, I use the methods above to keep accountability moving back and forth where it needs to be.

What’s Your Account?

Do you feel like you’re accountable at work? Is it because you take the initiative, or because others force accountability on you?