As a leader, it is your job to build an organization that trusts each other. Trust is the glue that keeps everyone together and opens up the opportunity for great things to happen.
In order to have trust, you must have accountability — it is not possible to get trust by edict. Without accountability, trust is damaged, and repairing trust becomes a management time sink.
Accountability comes when there is alignment with both rewards and consequences. We talk a lot about rewards and high performance, but we probably don’t talk enough about consequences.
There must be a shared upside when things go well and shared consequences when they do not. There must be proper analysis around the root cause of problems — often when you dig into the problem objectively, you see that it’s really a lack of connecting the dots.
Without accountability, there will never be trust. What are you doing to consistently require high performance from your team? How is that helping build more trust and results?
Meg Bear 