The best leaders hold their team accountable. Leading your team into meeting their goals and hitting their targets not only improves the morale of them personally, but it increases the morale of everyone on the team and gets employees to take initiative.
When a leader spends much of their time micromanaging their employees they are often left feeling that you don’t trust them to do their jobs properly. You become very unpopular and the employees become disengaged, which results in lost productivity. When employees feel like they are being constantly watched they get distracted and it effects working memory, becoming paralyzed by pressure.
Accountability is taking responsibility for your actions. Accountability asks for an immense amount of input from the team. A smart leader will emphasize the importance of accountability and get everyone on the team to understand what and who they’re accountable to.
You want to avoid micromanaging at all costs, employees want to be help accountable because it means they have more responsibilities. Accountability and responsibility leads to motivators like purpose and accomplishment.
Work with employees to discover what actions need to be taken. Work hard to give them access to the data they need to meet their targets. Ask team members how they’d like to be held accountable, and come up with a process that is good for everyone. But most importantly, set clear expectations. Setting clear, measurable goals makes it unambiguous about what is expected of them.
