Why Accountability is Critical for 10X Growth?

Do you know Why Accountability is critical if a company is envisioning a 10X growth?

Yes! The growth of the company can be effective and agile if we create a culture of accountability. It also promotes authenticity and helps in building up more avenues for growth and facilitates employee satisfaction.

The simple definition for accountability is accepting responsibility without any prompt. Successful leaders use accountability as a tool to achieve 10X growth for their business. Accountability gets better if the team works in a unified direction supporting the goals and strategic plans. 

Accountability at the workplace represents the belief that each and every employee ought to take responsibility for the work they’ve done. This essentially implies that you should plan ahead of time.

Let us discuss some key features that advocate accountability as an enabler for 10X growth.

Why Does Accountability Matter?

Let us apply the aspects of accountability to the 10 X rule derived by Grant Cadone and understand why accountability is critical. Accountability can be a refined approach to achieve targets that are set to 10X level and drive massive actions to derive expected outcomes.

Accountability matters the most for all companies as it boosts trust, improves the overall performance, and allows learning and exploration.

Let’s look at some of the advantages of a supremely accountable team.

1 Paves The Way For An Accelerated Learning Curve

Employees are bound to have an uphill task in self-development & improvement if they fail to identify their initial pain point. It’s impossible to grow and advance when one fails to acknowledge the errors. Experience, often, is a harsh teacher. But, at the same time, it opens up the chance of self-growth. That’s how accountability plays a formidable role in bolstering a company’s shot at 10x growth.

2 Trustworthiness

Accountability is not just the manager’s cup of tea. It should be treated as a team priority. While most employees value this quality all across the organization, trustability improves dramatically in an accountable team. 

When employees are not confident that the Team Members will maintain their accountability for their own functioning & actions, they are prone to peeking “over-the-shoulders”, fearful that a team member may put them underneath the bus.

When everyone is held accountable for their own productivity, people are more confident that their teammates will assist them. This will brew a family-like bonding where the team makes the company goal their own and march at it together!

3 Creativity Is An Essential Ingredient Of 10X Growth

Sometimes a team member can hit a roadblock and struggle to get past it. If you have an accountable partner, he/she can join forces with you in helping you examine the obstacle and recommend creative solutions. One can recognize and overcome flaws more swiftly with a peek into another person’s perspective.

The team members can expect to receive both encouragement as well as feedback on every action in an accountable team. it spurs creativity and eventually new breakthroughs that pushes the company’s limit manifold!

4 A Booster Dose For Performance

High-performing organizations often have well-defined roles & duties, precise objectives, and frequent progress monitoring. All of these factors increase accountability among team members, which reduces misunderstanding and saves time. As a result, the entire team’s performance gets a considerable boost.

5 Accountability Is Pivotal To Measure Growth

The growth of the company can be effective and agile if we create a culture of accountability. It also promotes authenticity and helps in building up more avenues for growth and facilitates employee satisfaction.

Engaged employees promote a positive culture of accountability as they relentlessly focus on solving the problem rather than identifying them.

For Instance, Google was the 18th search engine that entered the fiercely competitive space. It was unimaginable for a latecomer like Google to have a chance at glory, but fast-track to 2022, you are probably reading this blog on Google! 

Accountability is an important precursor for achieving exponential growth because it provides various avenues to collaborate, build trust, change the team dynamics and increase productivity. It acts as a catalyst for high performing teams.What are the tactics involved to make that happen? Let’s discuss!

Top 3 Hindrances To Accountability 

1 Lack Of Definite Expectations

Employees find it difficult to develop a sense of accountability if they are not aware of what is expected from them. While it may be tempting to believe that lacking set standards provides your employees more autonomy, it can undermine their capacity to take ownership of their responsibilities.

2 Low Engagement

Consider it this way. A company wants to promote accountability, but what’s the incentive for the employees to step up & take ownership? Many employees across the world think that their ideas are not heard enough to improve the company. This can reduce their engagement & they are significantly less inclined to take responsibility for their tasks.

3 Fear of Failure

Fear can play spoilsport. The fear of being punished for errors is often the single greatest hindrance of people taking up higher responsibility at work. Organizations that have serious ramifications for employees who commit mistakes can threaten the psychological safety of the employees. It implies that they won’t develop an attitude to own their blunders, strive for fresh ideas, or unfamiliar challenges. 

Top 5 tips to improve accountability focusing on 10X growth

1 Setting Ambitious OKRs with Cadence Cycles with Process Owners

Ambitious OKRs with regular cadence cycles have eliminated the blind spots and paved the way for hypergrowth for many top companies.

 The companies need to embolden their moonshot goals using OKRs with a mix and match of qualitative goals and quantitative accountability cadence and weekly check-ins. The results are phenomenal as the process owners are accountable for driving the OKRs.

A Key best practice to achieve 10X growth through accountability is to value the outcomes over inputs. On a weekly basis, the manager can identify the key deliverables and who is responsible for them and define the actions that they are accountable for. In this way, the company can rejoice in transparent success.

2 Effective strategy to track Accountability

It is important to track accountability using a data-driven approach in a non-judgmental spirit. There must be ZERO complexity in the organization when it comes to reporting. 

However, the company should strive to do it undeviatingly, by implementing simplified reporting of OKRs like objective grading and weekly check-ins using effective alignment strategies that have moved forward & prospered. This tactic is super-critical for scaling. 

It can be a difficult phase during the transition. It takes a lot of arduous conversations & might even require the deployment of top-notch OKR platforms. In this stage, it is inevitable to deploy continuous performance management to skyrocket the growth.

3 Combating Obscurity and Stretching the limits

Obscurity is a threat to focused teams. The team must focus on what matters the most and it becomes a lot easier when you instill accountability. In this way, the goals can be set based on top 3 priorities that need to be done to realise the vision.

Accountability can help in combating obscurity by defining the key results and expected outcomes and mapping it with process owners. The teams become accountable to perform better by focusing in a unified direction with a homogeneous thought process.

In this stage setting constraints on the capabilities can be misleading. It is a best practice to accelerate the performance in short bursts and discover new capabilities by instilling a good accountability system.

4 Employee engagement and accountability

When your end goal is a 10x growth, a certain team member’s growth rate of 4x isn’t fast enough.

Direct conversations with employees who are not scaling and motivating them by making them believe in their capabilities can do the trick. The best ones will eventually up their ante. All it takes is a candid & caring conversation of the manager with the employee

Growth can accelerate if employees feel motivated and engaged. This can be achieved by conducting effective 1:1s with the team members. The manager can gradually shift the accountability of these discussions to the employees to gain momentum on employee engagement. 

Thus, Accountability is the key enabler to provide a solid framework to complement the 1:1s discussion.

5 Leadership Accountability

Exponential results in growth can be achieved only when there is leadership accountability within the organization. Lack of leadership accountability can lead to mistrust, discarded goals, and disengaged employees.

What if Sundar Pichai backed off after Google’s first failure in achieving OKRs?  The OKR success story would have been a drastic flop show.

Leadership accountability is the most critical element to promote accelerated growth. The  CEO’s job is not only to set moonshot goals but also to bounce back on track where there is a blockade or stagnation in the performance. 

The keystone habit of CEOs from top companies is that they join the bandwagon of peers who can drive them to stay accountable.

Final thoughts

By inspiring and disciplining employees through accountability, companies can fast track their growth. It is imperative to understand that accountability is not about perfection or strictness.

 It is about being in control and improving by learning from mistakes. Accountability is essential to develop a focused approach towards the larger objectives of the company and to ensure the success of the company in the long run. In order to ensure 10X growth of the company, accountability is critical. 

Well, to learn more about accountability and 10X growth, contact our experts!