Quotes About Accountability

Wanting to be popular with your direct reports instead of holding them accountable.

No matter how good an individual on the team might be feeling about his or her situation, if the team loses, everyone loses.

Peer pressure and the distaste for letting down a colleague will motivate a team player more than any fear of authoritative punishment or rebuke.

The most important challenge of building a team where people hold one another accountable is overcoming the understandable hesitance of human beings to give one another critical feedback.

Listen, this is just an unpleasant part of our job sometimes. Those executives know that I took a bullet for them. I'll make sure they acknowledge that in some way, but I'm not going to punish them for it. Remember, they're paying us to help them make their company more successful, and if I had to be a trial balloon or a strategic piñata to make that happen, so be it.

Another way to understand this model is to take the opposite approach—a positive one—and imagine how members of truly cohesive teams behave: They trust one another. They engage in unfiltered conflict around ideas. They commit to decisions and plans of action. They hold one another accountable for delivering against those plans. They focus on the achievement of collective results.

Teams that are willing to commit publicly to specific results are more likely to work with a passionate, even desperate desire to achieve those results. Teams that say, "We'll do our best," are subtly, if not purposefully, preparing themselves for failure.

During the next two weeks I am going to be pretty intolerant of behavior that demonstrates an absence of trust, or a focus on individual ego. I will be encouraging conflict, driving for clear commitments, and expecting all of you to hold each other accountable. I will be calling out bad behavior when I see it, and I'd like to see you doing the same. We don't have time to waste.

And so a leader of a meeting must make it a priority to seek out and uncover any important issues about which team members do not agree. And when team members don't want to engage in those discussions, the leader must force them to do so. Even when it makes him or her temporarily unpopular.

Results-oriented teams establish their own measurements for success. They don't allow themselves the wiggle room of subjectivity. But this is not easy, because subjectivity is attractive.

Team Rewards By shifting rewards away from individual performance to team achievement, the team can create a culture of accountability. This occurs because a team is unlikely to stand by quietly and fail because a peer is not pulling his or her weight.

First, we go figure out how to recognize a real team player, the kind of person who can easily build trust, engage in healthy conflict, make real commitments, hold people accountable, and focus on the team's results. Then, we stop hiring people who can't. Finally, we help the people who are acting like jackasses change their ways or move on to different companies.

this point is critical—no one but the head of an organization can make it healthy.

Once we achieve clarity and buy-in, it is then that we have to hold each other accountable for what we sign up to do, for high standards of performance and behavior.

Rita laughed. "I know. Technically, you're right. But I think a guy at this level needs a little more rope." Rich was adamant now. "No. Less rope. Senior people should get less rope, because in the process of hanging themselves, they snag other people too.

I am going to be pretty intolerant of behavior that demonstrates an absence of trust, or a focus on individual ego. I will be encouraging conflict, driving for clear commitments, and expecting all of you to hold each other accountable. I will be calling out bad behavior when I see it, and I'd like to see you doing the same. We don't have time to waste.

One of the most difficult challenges for a leader who wants to instill accountability on a team is to encourage and allow the team to serve as the first and primary accountability mechanism.

An unrelenting focus on specific objectives and clearly defined outcomes is a requirement for any team that judges itself on performance.

Some people are hard to hold accountable because they are so helpful. Others because they get defensive. Others because they are intimidating. I don't think it's easy to hold anyone accountable, not even your own kids.

of the team members. Kathryn continued, "I want all of you challenging each other about what you are doing, how you are spending your time, whether you are making enough progress.

But I can assure you that we're going to find the right person. That means everyone here will be interviewing candidates and pushing to find someone who can demonstrate trust, engage in conflict, commit to group decisions, hold their peers accountable, and focus on the results of the team, not their own ego.

Great teams do not hold back with one another," she said. "They are unafraid to air their dirty laundry. They admit their mistakes, their weaknesses, and their concerns without fear of reprisal.

identify one particular insight from their profile that they feel highlights a weakness that they would like to address for the good of the team.

we like to believe that we do bad things because of the situations we are in, but somehow we easily come to the conclusion that others do bad things because they are predisposed to being bad. (Similarly