Creating Accountability

By Alan ZuckerLeadership, Project Management

At the beginning of my project management classes, I ask participants if they have any big, burning questions.  Accountability always tops the list.  Project managers face challenges when team members do not complete assignments on time or when stakeholders delay critical decisions.

I empathize. Getting people to do what is needed on time is a perennial management challenge. Unfortunately, there is no simple solution. People and organizations are complex, adaptive systems.  Every team and project is unique and faces its own special challenges.

Creating a culture of accountability is one solution. However, changing or establishing a new organizational culture demands intention, time, persistence, and commitment.

Create a Culture of Accountability

An organization’s culture is critical to its success. As Peter Drucker stated, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”  Implementing cultural change is difficult. Research from Bain and Company found that only 12% of organizational transformation efforts met or exceeded expectations, and half settled for mediocre results.

Leadership commitment and focus are a leading cause of failure.  Simply sending out an email or making a speech is not sufficient.  Project managers, managers, and leaders must recognize that changing the culture is a years-long undertaking that requires daily attention.

Establishing, building, and reinforcing new cultural norms necessitates an adaptable approach. Remember, this is a journey, not a destination. Embrace experimentation and be prepared for both successes and failures. Learn from your experiences and adapt your strategies accordingly.

Assess the Team

Measurement is critical to all improvement efforts.  Frameworks exist to measure accountability.  Patrick Lencioni’s “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” offers a hierarchy of leadership issues, with avoidance of accountability near the top of the pyramid.

Lencioni developed a survey that assists teams in assessing their current standing. Have the team complete the assessment. Discuss the results and pinpoint the primary factors that contributed to the scores. Develop specific plans to enhance the environment and group dynamics. Commit to the plan and reassess it every quarter or six months.

Engage Stakeholders

Stakeholders are individuals and groups affected by a project’s decisions, activities, or outcomes. This includes team members, leadership, vendors, customers, users, and sometimes the public.  Project success is dependent on actively managing stakeholder engagement.

Stakeholder engagement requires:

  • Identifying all potential stakeholders. A common pitfall is preemptively ignoring groups, only to learn later that they are critical.
  • Understanding their primary concerns and motivations. This knowledge improves the ability to influence and negotiate with impacted parties.
  • Communicate regularly with the stakeholders based on their interests. Address known issues and concerns, and listen for new ones. Monitor the effectiveness of the communication and adjust.
  • Develop an empathetic relationship.

Engaged and aligned stakeholders are more responsive and accountable.  They feel greater buy-in to the project’s success and outcomes.  Engagement establishes a relationship and creates the opportunity for sharing and influencing.  Cialdini’s Principle states that people are more likely to say “yes” to people they like.

Establish Norms

Norms promote accountability by defining expected and acceptable behaviors.  They can be formal or informal, describing how teams work together and establishing enforceable operating agreements.

Team charters or norms can provide guidance and set expectations for timeliness, decision-making, and intra-team accountability.  Contracts, service-level agreements, regulations, and bylaws establish formal rules of conduct.

These mechanisms foster a shared understanding among stakeholders regarding expectations. Consequently, gentle or more persuasive measures can be used to encourage compliance. The Feedback Model serves as a polite reminder of stakeholders’ obligations. Formal agreements contain provisions for addressing issues.

Use the Feedback Model

The Feedback Model is a behavior-based approach for providing feedback. It is non-confrontational and effective for creating and reinforcing accountability.  Cadence and consistency are necessary to build and maintain the culture and strengthen the norms.  Since the Model is non-confrontational and delivers feedback efficiently, the temptation to avoid “difficult conversations” is reduced.

The Model is a 4-step framework for having a performance dialogue:

  1. Can I give you feedback? If the answer is “no”, then the other party is not open (at that moment) for feedback.
  2. When you do X? Describe an observable action, such as being late with a task, or not meeting the quality expectations.
  3. The impact is Y. Describe the effect on the project or the team, such as delays, cost increases, or idled resources.
  4. Can you do Z instead? Be specific, describing expectations or other ways of fulfilling them.

Push Responsibility Down

Pushing decision-making down to the lowest responsible level empowers individuals, fostering ownership and accountability since they are more invested in the outcomes. Paradoxically, centralizing decision-making reduces accountability as there is a greater distance between those accountable and those responsible for executing the tasks.

Strategic, long-lasting, and far-reaching decisions should be centralized for efficiency. Frequent decisions, requiring specialized knowledge or a quick response, should be delegated to those closest to the work.

Delegated decision-making requires decision-makers to be trained in the process, equipped with the necessary tools, understand the project objectives, and possess proper context.  Encourage healthy and constructive debates about the best solution.

Create a “no fear” environment.  Punishing people for making poor decisions or mistakes encourages inaction.  Healthy team cultures view mistakes as opportunities for learning.

Promote Transparency

Visual project management tools promote transparency and accountability.  Team members feel more responsible when all work assignments, delays, and outstanding items are visible.  In healthy organizations, positive behaviors are self-reinforcing—people desire acknowledgment as productive community members.

Kanban boards and status-enabled roadmaps create transparency.  Conducting daily stand-up meetingsusing the boards promotes accountability.  For co-located teams, use big boards on the wall as a backdrop.  For virtual teams, use tools like Mural, Miro, or functionality embedded in Microsoft Teams or Zoom.   Collaboration tools like Jira, Trello, and Microsoft Planner can track progress and send notifications.   But do not rely on online tools to create accountability.

Shorten the Cycle

Establish practices that encourage short delivery and decision-making cycles.  Daily stand-up meetings with “meet afters” enable quick resolutions and decision-making.  Actively managing risks, action items, and issue lists fosters accountability.  Project managers must regularly follow up with responsible parties to ensure these items progress.

Be Organized

Fundamental organizational skills foster accountability by establishing expectations and cadence while reinforcing constructive team operations, including:

Proactively maintain project issue and action item registers.  Each item requires an owner and a due date.  Review items regularly.  Follow up on delinquent items.  Add new items when they are identified.

Hold regular and structured project team meetings. The meetings should have agendas with owners and start/end times for each topic. The project managers should ensure the meeting stays on track. Reviewing open issues and actions should be a standing topic. Recap new items at the end of the meeting to acknowledge ownership and understanding.

Follow up on everything.   The desired end-state is an empowered, self-managing team.  However, until our teams reach that state of bliss, a primary role of the project managers should be to follow up on everything and not let things slip through the cracks.

© 2025, Alan Zucker; Project Management Essentials, LLC

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