How to Hold Your Team Accountable: 6 Signs Nobody Owns Anything

Somewhere on your team right now there's a person who isn't delivering. You thought of their name before you got to the end of that sentence.

Over the next seven days, I'm going to show you they're probably not your problem. They're a symptom of it.

This is Day 1 of a seven part series, recut from a live workshop I ran called Stop Rescuing Your Underperformers. One leadership blind spot a day, for seven days.

Today it's number one, and it's the big one. Accountability. I've taught this for almost a decade, and if you did nothing else at all, this is the one that lifts team performance more than any other.

Here's the part most leaders miss. Every time you step in and do an underperformer's work, every time you make a decision for them, take a meeting yourself, or fix the thing before it goes upstairs, accountability shifts from them to you. So you probably haven't got a person who won't take accountability. You've got a person who doesn't need to.

In this episode I walk you through the rescue cycle, the six signs of an accountability vacuum so you can score yourself out of six, and the night at a social function when I found out two teams inside the same bank were building almost exactly the same thing. The overlap number still makes me wince.

I also answer two questions that came in live. Christina asks how you get someone to see their failures when they refuse to. Dylan asks how you motivate people with no ambition, who just show up and do enough to get by.

Grab a pen. You'll want to keep score.

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GET YOUR SCORE ON ALL SEVEN

Scoring yourself on one blind spot is useful, but it's a seventh of the picture, and the one costing you the most might not be this one.

The free Leadership Blind Spot Scorecard runs you through all seven, the same way we did it live.