Accountability and sense of ownership

If I had to tell you what my biggest fault as an employee is it would be my lack of patience with people who do not have a strong sense of Accountability or Ownership for the work they do.

I think in any working environment you need to be able to effectively communicate good news and bad news and realize that mistakes will happen. In a small office/employee group this communication is key to the companies success.

I make mistakes or sometimes miss something, but the moment I realize I did I stand up and say "Hey I messed up and need help!" Do I hold myself accountable, yes, do I learn from my mistakes, yes. When an employee does not have a strong sesnse of accountability they will often do the bare necessity when it comes to the task they are responsible for and if a certain aspect was missed will not call attention or ask for help out of fear of looking bad. Even when confronted about the issue you will find excuses instead of solutions to the problem.

How do you solve the problem? My first insticnt is to fire the person, but the better solution is to set up structured regularly occuring meetings. The format for these meetings shoudl always start with a recap of an Action Item list which lists:

1) The item to be done

2) Who the item is assigned to

3) Date the assignment is to be completed

This format we use for our weekly company call and our marketing team call, but can be applied to other departments from admin even to editorial to ensure we all have an internal checklist of what needs to be done. The inernal checklist will help people who do not always have a strong sense of accountability to provide updates on a regualr basis and the outcome will be one of two things:

1) The employee adapts to the working environment

Or

2) They still mess up and no improvement is seens during regular employee reviews, so the professional relationship has to end.

How do you deal with individuals in your company or work setting who do not share the same level of ownership as the rest of the business culture?

Send me your experiences at chasemarketing@sympatico.ca