Camille Rapacz: We all want accountability at work. And this usually means we want everyone to do their part, deliver on the responsibilities of their job, and meet our expectations. But this often doesn't pan out the way that we want it to. So how do we increase accountability in the workplace?
And what if we're actually part of the problem?
Camille: Welcome to The Belief Shift. The show that explores. What you really need to know about building a successful business.
I'm your host, Camille Rapacz: business coach and consultant who spent too much of her career working in corporate business performance.
George: And I'm George Drapeau: your co-host and her brother. I'm a leader in the tech world bringing my corporate perspective, but mostly my curiosity.
Camille: Together, we're exploring beliefs about success and how to achieve it. But mostly we're bringing practical solutions so you and your business can thrive.
Camille Rapacz: Hello, George. How do you feel about a good old discussion on accountability?
George Drapeau: Yeah, it's about time. I think it's about time we've talked about accountability. This is going to be good.
Camille Rapacz: Have we been putting this off? Maybe it's come up a few times, but we haven't done it.
Well, this
George Drapeau: is just before our episode on procrastination.
Camille Rapacz: Oh,
George Drapeau: brilliant. No, no, no, no, no, no. Forget I said that. I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to talk about procrastination, please.
Camille Rapacz: You want to procrastinate on talking about procrastination? Yeah. Well, I feel like accountability is one of those things that we all want more of, but we're not really sure how to go about getting it.
Every job I've ever had, or every client I work with. There's always some accountability challenge in there. I feel like it's like, when you're in a relationship and you just want your partner to just know what you need and just do it already.
Sometimes we're like that at work with people we work with, like, can't you just know and just do the stuff I need already? Yeah. Yeah. But that's not, that's not how any of this works, unfortunately.
So let's talk about this a little bit maybe we'll leave people with some ways that they might be able to improve this on their own.
That's always our goal. Help people out.
So let's start with a definition. We're just going to talk about , what is accountability? And then hopefully George, as usual, this will prompt some questions or some, maybe it'll dig up some great memories of the past and how this has worked out for you.
I hope so. I hope so too.
When we're talking about accountability, we mean the responsibility and ownership that we have as individuals and teams for our actions, decisions, tasks, and outcomes. So this means acknowledging the consequences of our own actions. On top of that, we have to own the results of those actions.
Whatever outcomes happen as a result of what we do, both negative and positive. Sometimes we think maybe just the negative side, but the positive side too here. We want to be proactive in meeting our commitments and our obligations, and we're holding ourselves accountable and our teams responsible for achieving shared goals as well as shared working norms, standards, and policies.
So there's like an individual component and a team component and, all the people that are around us. There was my very wordy explanation. What would you add to that? Does anything come up for you, George?
George Drapeau: Yeah. I mean, there's things that come up for like why accountability is important, but sticking to the definition, if I had to oversimplify this, I think this definition is better than oversimplifying this captures all the key things you need to know.
But if I were to oversimplify that, I would say accountability is. Following through on what you say you're going to do really can people count on you when they're asking you for something? And that does not mean you deliver everything you promised. Nobody delivers 100 percent of what they promised. We all try, but none of us are perfect.
But are you showing evidence that you're following through on what you've asked? When you can't deliver everything, do you open yourself up to a discussion about why?
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. I think that's a good simplification of it. I also think that part of the challenge of doing accountability well, as it also is not that simple. And that's one of the things I really want to talk about, is why it's not that simple.
So yeah, to your point, George, you were, going to the, why do we need it? That's the next place that we go with this. So now that we've said what it is, why do we need accountability?
Let's answer the question. So it fosters trust, it improves productivity, obviously. It improves effectiveness of communication. It allows you to better collaborate with your teams. It just raises the overall, success for everybody when everyone's doing their part.
But another part of this I think is, these are all nice things, we all want these things in the workplace, but let's be honest, we're all exhausted and overwhelmed and sometimes don't you think it would just be nice if people just did their work without me having to spend the extra time and energy getting them to do it?
We've all been there. Where you're just like, I'm so tired. I just want people to be accountable to their stuff.
George Drapeau: It's true. To be individually responsible for the things that they say they're going to do and they're working on. If you can just kind of count on them, that is so much easier.
Camille Rapacz: Counting on them.
I love that you said that phrase because that's part of the we're trying to build trust and building trust means I can count on you. Right. I can count on you to follow through on the work that we've agreed to do together.
George Drapeau: Yeah. May I add one thing to this list?
Camille Rapacz: Yes, you may.
George Drapeau: I think it's a form of trust, actually.
Repeatedly, when I get feedback from you as a manager, and When that feedback sometimes is in the form of like you create accountability within a group. I feel great about that. Usually when people aren't giving me that feedback, it's in the context of high morale will say, you know, I love being in this team because this team has a sense of accountability and we have a good morale because of it.
And that's because people know. First of all, the generally, this is a group that wants to be responsible to each other, accountable to each other, but also when there's a bad egg in the group, which rarely happens, but when it does happen, the group knows that that will be addressed.
You don't just let bad eggs go nature. You have to enforce consequences on things where people who are behaving badly. And when you have a culture of accountability, and you enforce those rules, the rest of the team notices and instead of just kind of grousing like, Oh man, doesn't the manager know that, you know, John sucks.
Come on. Isn't your manager going to do anything about it? You see the manager doing something about it and the people relax. The morale is higher.
I hope that's clear enough how I'm explaining it. I really do think it's a form of trust, but moral is a specific good outcome of accountability in my, experience.
Camille Rapacz: You are spot on. And that actually leads right into the next part of this conversation, which is why do we struggle so much? Why is it so hard to have good accountability for individuals and for teams?
Because yes, I think that one of the things that's on my list you brought up and so it's kind of a two way street and maybe a chicken and egg problem, which is low morale, low engagement, low motivation will make it hard to have accountability and accountability will actually raise that.
So they're kind of playing on each other. They're both they're both having an effect on each other. If you can raise accountability, you can improve engagement and morale. But if you let engagement and morale stay low, it's hard to improve accountability. So like, which do you do first?
And of course the answer is, it depends like most things that I answer, but without getting into the weeds on that. I have a nice list here of some of the things, and maybe as I'm talking through these, you'll think of some other things you want to add in here, George. But here's some of the reasons why teams struggle with this or leaders struggle to bring accountability into an organization. So this is something for as you're listening to me talk through this list. You can kind of be thinking for yourself, like, Oh, I wonder if that's an issue where I work, wonder if that's an issue in my team.
So the first one and this can occur more specifically in different types of teams, which is like a team that has a bunch of like strong leaders or people who pride themselves on being really independent.
And those people can sometimes struggle with being told what to do, and they can interpret accountability as being told what to do. So that can be just problem number one. I often find this with when I work with like small business owners, they're doing small business ownership because they feel lots of independence and they want to stay independent and they have a hard time even staying accountable to themselves because they don't even want to tell themselves what to do.
Oh, wow. Yeah. So there's that. Sometimes as humans, we just struggle with that. Is that ever a problem for you?
George Drapeau: Not so much. I think I'm pretty good at being told what to do. I really do like to know why I'm being told to do something that helps me a lot. But if I got trust, , this is not a problem for me.
Camille Rapacz: Some of it I think too is just some maturity.
Like you can kind of mature into the, like, I get it. I get what I'm supposed to do here.
George Drapeau: Yeah, that's right.
Camille Rapacz: So another one is lack of clarity. So if it's not clear what we're being held accountable to, what is my role? What are my responsibilities? What is expected of me?
And I find often that it's easy to assume that people know this. We just assume, of course they know but we should never assume. We all know why. We should never assume. And so clarity, just asking yourself, like, have I made it clear? And if you're not sure, then you should make it clear. You can never make things clear enough when it comes to the workplace, as far as I'm concerned.
I've never seen an organization that's being overly clear about things. it's never a problem.
This kind of ties into the next one, which is poor communication. So there's just like a lack of transparency and the communication channels are messy. Even if we're trying to communicate, it's just getting lost.
So that's another reason why it might be happening. Absolutely.
Another one is and you've already alluded to this, George, which is just a lack of psychological safety. Maybe think about this as we have a blame culture, or maybe it's frowned upon to ask for clarity.
Maybe you don't have an environment where you feel like you can get clarity about roles and responsibilities in your job because people are going to look at you like, really? You have to ask that? So being able to have an environment where people can really get clear about what's expected of them is really important. Yes.
My next one is lack of consequences. So you brought this one up. In your example. If people are not held accountable, then, what's the point? And we're going to talk about this a little bit more in a minute, but just this idea that we're not holding people accountable to these expectations that we've set.
It doesn't work by just setting clear boundaries, expectations. You have to be willing to follow through on them. And this is where Leadership really comes into play. Really good leaders know how to do this well in a non punitive manner. They know how to get their team on board, in line, holding them accountable in a way that is not making them feel bad or shaming them.
Because that's not what accountability is about. But it is one of the reasons why we hesitate is some people feel that way about it. So it's all about how you do this that matters.
George Drapeau: This brings up another thing for me that's related to morale is a sense of fairness. I think fairness is really important for people and, when you know that things are fair, the tension goes way down,
Camille Rapacz: Absolutely. Yeah. Fairness is a big deal. You absolutely need to be thinking about that and it doesn't mean you're treating everybody identically. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. You are making sure that there is a fair level of expectation and all of that is working for the team.
Another reason is overwhelm. So sometimes teams are just, people are just overloaded. The workload is too high. Their stress load is too high and some people really freeze up when they get in that point. So even if they're trying to follow through and have accountability to the work they have, they just can't operate in that level anymore, or they just can't get to all the work.
And so that can cause people to not be able to have accountability.
George Drapeau: Yeah. I suffer from this one from time to time for sure.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. And I think it gets back to what you said earlier too, which is, part of being accountable is recognizing when you can't do it all. Because it doesn't mean I'm going to be perfect and do all the things.
But you do need to be able to recognize when you're overloaded. And then have a conversation to be able to do something about that. Let somebody know, who it's going to affect. Have a conversation with your boss about how to, you know, reprioritize work. Something has to happen there. You don't just sit in the overwhelm and not respond to it.
Because it's not going anywhere. Until you do something. Absolutely.
My last one here on the list is fear of failure. So sometimes people are not maintaining a level of accountability to work that they need to do and responsibilities because they're worried of that they're going to fail when they do it.
And so maybe they're not clear on what the expected outcome is maybe it's just an environment where failure is not an option. There could be lots of reasons why this happens, but just fear of failure might also be a reason. Maybe you have somebody on your team and you keep having this issue, this is another thing to explore is maybe that's part of what's going on for them is they're worried that they're going to fail.
And so they're kind of avoiding the task.
George Drapeau: Yeah, I get that.
Camille Rapacz: On top of all of these reasons, I would say one of the big ones that I hear often is that it just sounds punitive. We say we want a culture of accountability. People are like, well, that doesn't sound very fun.
Right. Yeah. If I do go into a team and accountability is a positive to them, if they feel like, yeah, we love the idea of accountability, then they're doing it right. Because they realize that when we have a culture of accountability, we have systems in place for it, everything goes better.
Like everybody's work is just better. It's just a better, easier, more rewarding way to work as a team. So you definitely want to approach this with that idea that this is a positive. It's not about punishing people. It's about leveling people up.
George Drapeau: It makes me think about some of the high performing sports teams that you read about and hear about. Here's an example. Watch a volleyball team, you know, college volleyball, men's or women's teams, especially the women's teams. I noticed, a woman's team will lose a point and they'll all get together in the sloppy to the clap as if they just won something or if somebody missed something, they'll all rally around the person who missed because they're all supporting the person.
Those people, they don't. shy away from responsibility when they've lost a point or couldn't make a dig or whatever, because they all do it and this accountability shield forms around the person who lost that individual point because they know they all have a part in it.
Camille Rapacz: That's an interesting take on accountability, just the fact that we're both going to be really owning the mistake or the miss that happened, but we actually own it as a team.
George Drapeau: Yeah. And it's almost like before you even get the chance to own up to it, we're going to come and support you and say, it's okay.
We know you were going to own up to it because for the most high performing teams, that's how it is.
Camille Rapacz: I think if you can raise accountability on a team, it's probably one of the most powerful ways to raise the overall performance of the team. Because it requires all these other things to happen.
It requires you to have a good system, a good communication, all these other pieces. We're going to get into this a little bit more detail, but I think if you're going to focus on something in a team in order to improve their performance, getting accountability right is really essential.
So how do we improve accountability?
George Drapeau: How do we do it? I was just wondering the same thing.
Camille Rapacz: Magic beans. What do you got?
George Drapeau: When I've come into teams where I've assessed them and it seemed like basically people are good actors and I don't have any bad eggs and maybe we don't have an explicit culture of accountability, but you could see people are generally responsible.
What I've done in the past is ask teams, do you mind if we make our work public to each other? You can see what everybody is doing. We're not looking to blame here, we're just going to give you exposure. And generally if the team is filled with good, individually accountable people, that turns into group accountability pretty quickly and pretty easily.
It's harder when you don't have trust, when you have some of the science that you were talking about here and you have to start, and then I think you build it slowly. I'd be interested in hearing what systems you put together to get accountability going.
Camille Rapacz: I'll talk a little bit about how you can go about this for your team when we get to the end here, but I kind of want to just talk through, like, what are kind of the essential components to doing this? What are the things you need to do in order to improve accountability?
Because there are definitely different ways to go about it. And I think you brought up a really good point, which is, you have to think about the team you have in front of you. Yeah. So if I have a team of individual high performers who are confident in the work that they do, that's going to be pretty easy to start building systems of accountability as a team.
If I have anybody on my team who's maybe unsure of themselves. People who in their past lives with the previous boss, it was a very punitive type of environment. And so they had a hard time learning to trust my approach to accountability and my investment in people on my team.
They didn't trust it at first because they didn't have that before. So if that's new on your team, you might have to break through some of that. Overcome some of their old wiring about what it means to work for somebody else, they only have this one bad experience. Absolutely.
So that can be part of it. And then you just have to, actually understand are they struggling to have their own independence? There's personal dynamics that go on here, so you do need to understand the individuals on your team and not expect all of them to equally be able to embrace this in the same way.
But as you said, if you do have a good team of high performers, it becomes a lot easier to do. And this is where I think it can be a struggle for leaders to try and do this because they realize, all of my people on my team are not the same. So how do I do this? How do I tackle this when I don't have that?
And the first thing I think to know and this might seem obvious, but it happens sometimes where we're just expect people to be accountable. This is a human expectation for us to have. I expect other humans around me to just be accountable for themselves. But in the workplace, this turns into something else.
Because you're the boss, and you have, as a leader, certain expectations. You have to make those clear, because they don't really know what they're being held accountable to. And so again, it gets back to not assuming that we know what that is.
And we also have to tackle this from all sorts of different angles. We have to think about this. I need a system of accountability. I don't need one conversation or, one statement, I need to build a system of accountability. So processes and capabilities have to be developed all together.
And then to kind of simplify it, I also like to think about it in there's really two main categories, and then we'll kind of hit on a third as well. But the two I'm really focusing on our accountability for yourself. So self accountability and then accountability with others or a team. So let's just talk about their self and team.
And the third one is how do you help your boss with accountability, which is kind of a different angle on this. There are these three layers, so I'm going to focus on the first two and then we'll kind of touch on the third one a little bit. Great.
So self accountability, the reason I want you to start here is, I mean, it's going to sound obvious, but you need to clean up your own house first.
Yeah. You have to set the example. You cannot ask your team to do things that you're not willing to do as a leader. I often find people are looking to get accountability on their team and then we realize they're not actually doing the behaviors that they want their team to be doing. If you don't model them, how can you expect them to do it?
You cannot be the boss that says, do as I say, not as I do. It's not a good way to run a team. No way. I mean, you can be that if you want to, but then you probably should not listen to my podcast because that's not the kind of leader that we want to bring up here.
In order to do this, one of the things that's important is that you might actually feel like, so if you're listening to this, you're probably like, I think I'm pretty good at self accountability.
The important thing is to what others think. How you are perceived is what's really important. In self accountability, as you're trying to then bring a team around to also being accountable. So maybe you are doing things and they work for you. But if your team doesn't perceive that you have good accountability, that's important for you to know.
So make sure that you're thinking from that perspective, because, you might be like, Oh, this all I've and I've had leaders like this, they're like, Oh, the way that I work and how this this all works fine, I get all my stuff done. But it's not good for their team. Their team has a hard time engaging with them, getting things from them, understanding what's important.
And that's as a leader, really all that matters. I know as we become leaders, sometimes we think it's supposed to be like easier and we get more agency to what we do, but it actually gets harder if you do it right. But it's worth it.
Yeah. I don't want to scare anybody off who's thinking about being a leader. It's totally worth it. People hang in there.
So some of the things you want to think about in personal, your self accountability. I'm curious what you think, George, as I go through this list, if anything comes up, but I think of things like be clear about your goals, know your priorities manage your time and your energy accordingly, and have that personal management system, like, how do I track my own work, my own tasks, my own responsibilities? And then on the squishier side of this is just knowing what motivates you.
Like what motivates me and how do I have a growth mindset around that? And how do I just better understand again how I am perceived in my accountability to myself? Yeah. And one of the best tools we think we've talked about this before is an accountability partner. So if you're really struggling with accountability, get support with a colleague, a coach, a mentor who can help you have some accountability on, whatever you're struggling with.
But building all of these things out, you can see like, this is a whole system with mindset and systems and processes and, and establishing goals. Like you have to have all of that kind of working together.
George Drapeau: The accountability buddy one is a favorite of mine. I love that one.
Camille Rapacz: It's also a great way if you're just trying to build any of these systems out for yourself, like maybe you're like, I don't, don't have a really good personal management system.
I run into this one a lot, like my tasks are, you know, all over the place in different lists and I'm just not doing a very good job. Getting an accountability partner with somebody who also wants to improve that can be a great way for you to like, let's help each other build a better system, build a better way to do this.
It also makes it more fun.
So that's what self accountability is really all about, is clean up your own house first. Anything you'd add to that, George?
George Drapeau: Opening myself up to critique, which can be tough to do, but if I can be open to hearing critique that makes it easier for others to hold me accountable because when they have to give me feedback or something.
They want to tell me it's easy for them to say George. Where's that thing you said you were going to do or you didn't do it or whatever. And if they know that I'm safe to talk to, it diffuses the tension, that whole conversation, which lowers the tension for holding me accountable.
So me being open to critique and being able to take it constructively is part of me getting my house in order.
Camille Rapacz: I was going to say that's part of the growth mindset, but then as you were talking, I realized maybe there was something else I would add to the list, which is around not trying to be perfect.
Just accepting that I won't be able to be perfect at this. So that's not what I want you to do when I say clean up your own house first. I want you to have something that works effectively. But do not have the expectation that you will 100 percent meet everybody's expectations. You cannot. And I know people who try to do this and they just burn themselves out or they get themselves where they're just ruminating on something all the time.
Like they can't stop just thinking about a thing that they missed, a ball that they dropped. There's this mindset around being okay with the level of excellence you were able to achieve. And not setting yourself up for failure by expecting more than is reasonable. And I think that that's a huge part of self accountability is also being accountable to just what works in your life.
Kind of gets to boundaries, we've talked about boundaries and just knowing what that is. You do have to have some personal boundaries around this as well. And that's a tricky balance to then what other people are expecting of you, but you can't beat yourself up about all of that stuff. Cause I'm pretty sure anybody listening to this podcast has way more things on their list to do than they're ever going to be able to accomplish because that's how high achievers work.
George Drapeau: Yeah, absolutely.
Camille Rapacz: So let's tackle the, how do you do accountability on a team? You want to do what I just said for yourself, but then also do it for your team. Pretty straightforward, yep. Sounds super simple, but it is why you start with yourself. Like, if I can do this for myself, then I know what it means to go and do this for a team.
So you want to do that. You want to be really transparent with your team about what you're doing and why. And you said this already, George, which is purpose. Make sure the team knows the purpose behind it. And that it's not, Hey team, we're failing at this. Or we dropped the ball on that. It shouldn't be from a punitive standpoint.
It should be from a, we want to be the best team at delivering X service to Y people. And that's why we're doing this. This is our purpose. We're trying to be the best at something. Or we're trying to, raise the level of performance of our team. Overall, we want to be known in the organization as the people that anybody can count on for X.
Like, that's the kind of motivation you want to start with when you're working to build accountability. Yeah. Yeah. Agreed. And that's how you start coaching and supporting your team into this space of building accountability. And then you've got to create the systems and processes that work. And I love when leaders can do this.
As a team effort this is a team process of let's decide together how this is going to work now you as a leader may have certain things that you want them to do like I want them to use this system for managing projects or I want them to follow my process for XYZ you can bring those in. But it will go a long ways to bringing people, helping people stay accountable if they feel like they were part of developing the process and that you bothered to even ask them, will this be hard or easy for you?
Yeah, totally. That's awesome. Some people take to like a new software. We were just talking about this, some people take to using a new software easier than others, but first ask them the question, is this going to be hard for you? If so, why? And then how do we fix that? But it doesn't mean that you give them a pass.
If you've got like five out of six team members are all in, you got to find a way to bring team number six, along. That's the beginning by the way of creating accountability in the team is when you create the system, you don't let anybody opt out of it.
That's accountability level number one is nobody gets to opt out of our system of accountability. I know it's meta, but that's how it works.
So what do you do, George? Do you have any good stories on either team accountability that was like totally dialed in or maybe where it like just went totally off the rails?
George Drapeau: Mostly I have good experiences with accountability with managers who have held teams to account. I'm thinking of one guy who is fantastic at change management and also good at holding people accountable. He was a funny guy. He was pleasant to talk to. You also didn't want to mess with him and people respected him a lot.
He had this kind of mild detachment from the team, although he was, you know, in his office at any time, but he wasn't, wasn't friendly like me. And so you walked into this organization and there was clearly a standard. He also had tooling, very crisp tooling that made the goals that you're talking about, what everybody needed to do, very well laid out.
You come into this organization, it's clear what's expected of you, how to account it, where people stand against each other, if you chose to compete, if you wanted to do, or just didn't see where you did. So he had set up a nice system, really nice system for holding people accountable. And then he was very regular about enforcing standards. That's was nice. And so he had a high functioning organization.
I have an example of a manager who was just totally chaotic, smart guy, but completely chaotic. And you didn't know really what you were going to be punished for or rewarded for on a day to day basis. The reaction of that and the team was that we were either paralyzed or felt like we were sneaking around doing our own individual actions. When under a different manager, our own individual actions would have been the way to go.
We're trusted to know our jobs as best we could, but under this chaotic we didn't know what his standards were. Just felt like anything that we did on our own was sneaking around and that was horrible. It was a horrible feeling.
Camille Rapacz: Accountability really requires you to have this consistency and stability in the team as well. And some people thrive on working in that chaotic environment, they adrenaline rush of the showing up for the fire, putting out the fire, redirecting all the time.
Lots of leaders just operate that way. There is value in those types of people in certain types of jobs and scenarios and the best ones recognize that that's who they are and they supplement the gap they have with someone else who can bring the stability and the accountability into the team. But a lot of them, I don't know, maybe they're a little too narcissistic to actually see that and that there's this part of them that's missing. I think sometimes it's easy to assume that everybody else is seeing the world through the same lens we are. Like, well, I see the value in this chaos and this stuff. So doesn't everybody else? And it's very easy to miss.
Yeah. It gets back to, we haven't had a full episode on this yet, which we need to do, but it gets back to the, also that idea of just having some emotional intelligence and being able to understand how, we are moving through the world as well as others.
So yeah. Yeah. Very important.
So this culture of accountability. You want to reward the good behavior as much as you deliver constructive feedback on the not so good behavior. So if you want accountability to work, you do have to give positive feedback when it's working well. Make sure the team knows.
That's what I wanted. That's exactly the conversation I wanted us to have. That's the follow through I've been looking for. Like, you have to let them know that it's working. That you recognize their efforts in accountability. Or, you know, we're humans, and so after a while we might be like, I guess nobody's really noticing, so why am I bothering?
Because it's going to be work for them. So they're like, why am I bothering to put this extra work in to show my level of accountability if nobody sees it? So you have to see it and recognize it. I think that's true.
Do you want to touch on the idea of holding your boss accountable?
George Drapeau: Yeah. I love this idea.
Camille Rapacz: It's like a sticky one. Hmm. So is it possible? Can you hold your boss accountable? Yes. Okay. Have you been held accountable? Surely. Oh yeah. All the time. Surely you have. Yeah. Yes. I think the best people to work for are the It's less fun.
George Drapeau: This conversation is less fun when I'm the boss.
It's more fun when I'm talking about somebody above me holding them accountable.
Camille Rapacz: Okay. Let's talk about that. I mean, I am my own boss, so I have to talk about holding me accountable to me, which is a little weird. Yeah. So we have to use you as the example. Yeah. Okay. I know. So, yes, you can hold your boss accountable and you know you're working for, like, a really great leader if they're welcoming it.
If they're like, bring it on, let's talk about how accountability works in both directions and that it's not one directional. Often I see that it's one directional. So it's, I'm going to hold you accountable, team, but don't worry about me. And that's not a great relationship to have. And it's not because I'm trying to even the playing field and I'm not trying to say that now you're equals.
What I am trying to say is accountability has to be a complete team effort. So even you as the boss, you don't get to opt out.
George Drapeau: Doesn't this go back to the concept of servant leadership? If you practice servant leadership, my accountability to the people I lead is a big part of that.
Camille Rapacz: Yes, if you go to that place of servant leadership, then you really are talking about my job is actually to serve my team, which means I need to be fully accountable to them.
And that's ideally where you want to go. So if you have a boss who is really embraces the idea of servant leadership, then this is going to be pretty easy to do. Yeah. You just have to have a conversation with them about how do I help hold you accountable.
What can I do for you?
George Drapeau: Hey servant, how are you being accountable to me?
Camille Rapacz: How will you serve me today? Yeah, that's not how that works. But having a conversation with them about accountability will be welcome. They'll be like, yes, let's talk about how this is a two way street. How do we do this together? Fairly easy to do, but not everybody has that kind of a relationship.
They may not have a boss. It's like that, but you can still have these conversations. You can still start to uncover how do I do this well? You're going to go back to the same list we've been at before, which is how do I just clarify expectations, priorities, deliverables? Like what's the best way for us to do that as a team?
And it will vary depending on the team that you're on. Some of it is going to be, you're going to be using some, Project management application online and other people are going to have, daily team huddles and there's all sorts of ways that you can make sure you're having these, but it has to be frequent.
There has to be a way to frequently see what's important. Now, what am I being held accountable to? And what is the work of import today? So that's level 1. But there's another level, which is around what are the expected norms, behaviors, how do we operate as a team, generally, how do we treat each other?
It's easy to say, sure, we should all just be kind to each other, but that's not enough to have a high performing team. You have to go further than that. And so you can ask these questions of your leader, like, Hey, what's the next level of having a high performance team?
If we're really operating optimally, what does that look like? What should we be doing? What do you want us to aspire to? Because that starts to set the tone for what they want to hold you accountable for in terms of how you approach the work. So not just the deliverables you're cranking out, but how am I actually doing this work with my team members?
George Drapeau: Absolutely.
Camille Rapacz: And there's little things you can do as well, which is, do you have regular check ins with your boss? When you do that, are you talking through the same? It might sound boring, but do you have the same checkpoints? Like, hey, am I hitting on the right priorities? Am I hitting on the work in the right way?
Am I delivering the level of quality you're looking for? Like, you're constantly checking in to make sure that you are, hitting the right level. And then you're reversing that. And you're saying, You know, Hey, can I now, you know, talk to you about how you can help me in making my work go better?
Sometimes it's just, I just needed you to sign off on that thing faster than you did. Mm-Hmm. , which is mostly what we're asking our bosses to do. Will you sign off on my thing so I can make progress? Right. You're the checkbox. Yeah. In this hierarchy, and I need you to check the box.
Yeah. So making sure they understand how that slowed your productivity is important. And if you make it about productivity in the team, they are more apt to engage in that conversation than if you make it personal. And I know that sounds awful, but it's true because their job is to make things productive on the team.
George Drapeau: Remove roadblocks and able the team to go do better.
Yeah, absolutely.
Camille Rapacz: Exactly. So, and then you could go another level, which is to, I wonder if anybody's ever done this to you, George. To just be curious about like, how do you do it? How do you stay accountable? What's your personal management system look like? How do you manage all the tasks and all the work in your day?
If they share that with you, you'll suddenly start to recognize ways that you can work into that system. Like maybe they're heavily managed their day by email, or maybe they heavily manage it by the calendar or by some, task application or who knows what they're doing, but there's going to be something that they're kind of relying on.
And if you can learn what that is. Then you can try and plug into that.
George Drapeau: I have asked a form of that question to a couple of managers of mine and I, before we started the podcast, remember talking to you about some of it. So one of the things I'm always curious about is how executives manage their time and accountability is a big part of that because they get very busy and overwhelmed, but they have to be accountable.
They can't just take a meeting. They have to follow up on it. They have to usually do something or make some decision. And so I sometimes ask what's your system for managing your day and your week or whatever that is. I get fascinating responses, but not just the bosses, just about anybody.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. Has anybody ever asked you that question?
And so if I ask you that question right now, what would you say?
George Drapeau: Well, I have, when I'm on my game, I tend to break down my, my work life into week by week. Since Sunday night is when I do my planning. When I've already done kind of this Stephen Covey, think about your values up front. So I break down to know what I'm going to do over the week.
And then I have a system for thinking about what I want to accomplish according to different roles in my life as a father, as a worker, as a technical executive, different things, and pick a few things, not too many. And then map them out in the calendar. So I make time during the week to do them. This is when I'm on my game.
I don't always do it, but at least if I do that, I know what I want to achieve from seven different aspects of my life in that week. And even if I don't map it out in the calendar, even just doing that much listing what's important to me as a traveler this week, as a father this week, as a director this week, et cetera.
Puts me ahead of the game.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. And I like that you were looking at all the aspects too. So I think getting back to just self accountability, this is accountability and we're talking in the workplace, but you wanna do this for everything.
What does it look like in my personal life, in my relationships, as a parent? As a a spouse? As a, a spouse. Yeah. Especially some of us with aging parents, you know, what's my responsibility and my accountability in that scenario? George just made a funny face, shaking his head like not so much now.
George Drapeau: Sorry, mom.
Camille Rapacz: So all of that is really important to be able to include in this idea of accountability.
But even if you just tackle one of those things and you focus on one aspect of your life as a way to start building out, if this is new to you and you don't have a good system of accountability for yourself, it's a really important aspect of, it's going to help you move through the world so much easier than if you don't do it.
Yes. Agreed. I think holding your boss accountable. That's a thing you can do.
George Drapeau: This is a thing you can do. The best bosses have no problem with it.
Camille Rapacz: They have no problem with it. So it's kind of a way for you to see, how good is your boss? But also if they do have a little bit of a problem with it, I think you can still make headway by asking them, what do you do?
How do you keep it all straight? Obviously you're doing something right, because you're my boss, so tell me how you're doing this. And whatever you glean out of that might help you come up with a little strategy for how you might be able to do a better job holding your boss accountable to things that help you do your job better, because that's really what you have to do.
Absolutely, for sure, yeah. All right, I will repeat once again, because I also love systems, and I love any time I also run into people who talk about systems as like great solutions for things. The key to doing this is creating a system and culture of accountability.
This means you need processes. You need lots of communication. You need to have a growth mindset, and as a leader, that's your job. You bring that into your team. And you want to do that for everybody on your team, hopefully across the entire organization is what you're doing.
There's no magic bullet here. There's no magical tool or thinking that if we just all use this one app, it's going to solve all our problems is not the solution.
It can be one tool in this whole system that you build, but all the other things have to go with it. You still have to build the culture of accountability. You still have to build out the processes, the expectations for how we use this tool, all those good things. And that goes true for anything, anytime you adopt a tool into your, team, by the way.
No tool is a magic bullet. No, no way. So if you're a leader and you're trying to improve accountability on your team, first tackle self. Work on that first, get your own house in order, and then try maybe taking your team offline for a couple hours, and build that system together, build your little system of accountability, do a little mini retreat, say, okay, let's improve this, let's figure out how we're going to do this together, and do it together. And then, Hold everybody accountable to using that system.
That's like a level one accountability. We're going to hold ourselves accountable to our system of accountability and just get that going first. That's your starting point. Make sure you give it purpose and that it's not punitive, but that it's a way for them to really you're trying to eliminate all the chaos so that the team can level up.
You're going to level up performance. I genuinely believe in when I have a team, I believe in their potential to do more. That's why I hired them. And if I create a system of accountability, that's one way that they can get to higher levels of their potential. So approaching it that way will really help and get everybody on board.
Any last comment on this before we close out George?
George Drapeau: We've covered a lot of ground. I think in my opinion, accountability is another one of those things that it's doesn't have to be mysterious. It's not easy, but once you break it down like this, it's straightforward how you can start gaining it.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah, it is pretty straightforward. And I do think people forget and all of this stuff, anything we talk about in leadership, I'm always going to say, start with yourself first, get your own head wrapped around it, but don't try to be perfect.
Understand, what level you want to reach and then start bringing that into your team. Absolutely.
But also, if this is something you want help with, you know what you should do. We should talk because this is how I help people. You can book a free consultation at camillerapacz.com/bookacall. There's a little link in the show notes. Also, if you have stories of accountability, maybe, I don't know, the fun stories are usually accountability gone wrong. Or how accountability works for you and your team. Maybe you've come up with some brilliant way that it's really working well.
We would love to hear your stories. And you can leave us a voicemail. You can go to the belief shift. com and there's a little button, a little widget where you can leave us a voicemail. So we'd love to hear your stories as well. Yeah. Awesome. That's all I have for this week. And we will be back in your ears next week.
you soon, everybody. Thanks everybody.
