How to create an Accountability Culture

When we’re in the frenzy of building our start ups, we always obsess over the product and customer seeking that external validation of what we’re building or trying to achieve. And ultimately, that’s absolutely right and fair but the mistake we often make is that we obsess over this at all costs and especially the cost of company culture.

Specifically, we often think that, paranoid for our own survival, that we can sort culture out ‘later’…whenever that day might be. We might think that culture and discipline can wait until after we have delivered critical milestones — but the reality is that it is in these formative times that the foundations for your culture are set.

As a leader you are ultimately accountable for culture and the culture of an organisation is often an extension of your own behaviours. You are accountable for any successes, as well as any failures your organization may have.

So, accountability is already part of the job description but many CEOs and Founders fail to rise to the challenge of creating, and modelling, an accountability culture. If you try to duck it, it will have a negative impact on the culture, performance and team bonds throughout the organisations.

And I don’t need anyone to tell me this because I’ve got this badly wrong before to my peril. I’ve seen when it’s worked amazingly well, and paid the price when I haven’t modelled that culture myself.

So, how do we create an accountability culture:

1. Be clear on your goals. If it doesn’t matter where we want to get to, why does it matter which direction we go in. The more clarity and alignment that we bring to our goals, the more likely we are to achieve them. We need to start with the BIG picture, what do we want out of our life and how do we want to look back on it, and make sure that the steps that we’re taking are going to deliver on that vision. We need to make sure that our goals are in alignment with, and supportive of, the vision we have for our life as well as being internally coherent and supportive of each other (i.e. do all the goals support each other or are any of them mutually exclusive. When we bring that alignment to what we’re trying to achieve with our careers and lives then we are much more likely to be success in not only achieving the bigger goals, but also the smaller steps that will help us to get there. Future scripting, or visualisation, are powerful tools to help you to bring clarity to your longer term visions and aspirations. Once you have that longer term vision locked in, it needs to be broken down into ambitious and achievable medium term (1–5 year) goals to will deliver on the impact and success we want to achieve.
2. Break your bigger goals down into shorter term objectives and tasks. Big goals and dreams are important motivators and act as powerful north stars for our efforts. But to make them feel, and be, achievable, we need to break them down into smaller steps that we can use to measure progress and to maintain momentum. Frameworks such as OKRs (Objectives and Key Results (and Initiatives)) are great frameworks for doing just that so that we can ensure we are delivering the outputs that we need to be successful. Crucially, it is the achievements of these objectives against which we can hold ourselves accountability on a regular basis. So, break your longer term goals down into a monthly or quarterly objectives with key targets or results which will demonstrate to you whether or not you’ve achieved them along with the key initiatives that you’re going to take to achieve them.
3. Socialise everything. When we socialise our goals and objectives we do a few powerful things. Firstly, we leverage our natural yearning for connection to almost shame ourselves into doing things — once we’ve socialised a goal we’re not going to want other people to think less of us by not delivering. So we work harder to deliver on our commitments when we know other people can hold us to account. Secondly though, by socialising our goals and accountabilities, we also give other people pointers as to how they can help us out. If everyone is aware of what we’re trying to achieve then they have a better understanding on what they can do to help us, and which opportunities to share with us. Once you have set out your goals and objectives, find a constructive and outcome focused way to share those with critical team members who are best placed to help you out.
4. Create an accountability structure. Building on what we’ve said above, it’s important that you create a structure around your accountabilities for measuring progress, assessing whether or not you have successfully achieved, and even crafted objectives (where you overly ambitious or too pessimistic when you set your objectives in the first place?). Often this involves using a third party, like a coach or mentor, a team member or on a program like the Accountability Dojo. To create a credible and supportive accountability structure; Find someone to act as your accountability coach or buddy; Agree regular time slots to check in on progress and keep them updated; Develop a reporting and measurement framework so you can measure progress objectively; make sure the culture of the framework is outcome-focused — remember it’s not about judgement but behaviours
5. Schedule your time and expenditure to support your goals and objectives. As [Peter Drucker] once said, if you tell me what your priorities are, I might believe you, but show me your calendar and I’ll know what your priorities are. The same is true with your objectives. The most successful people amongst us prioritise their time, and take proactive steps, towards the things that are important to them, rather than always being reactive to other people’s requests and to succumbing to other peoples communications and scheduling. If we bring real intention and purpose to everything that we do, and start with the end in mind knowing what it is that we want to achieve (the outputs rather than the inputs) then we’re much more like to deliver on our longer term goals. To maximise your productivity bring some awareness to what your ideal day would look like including how you carve up your time so you can maximise your ability to get into a flow state and do great work for long interrupted periods of time. Then schedule your work in accordance with these guidelines so you can have as much high quality time as possible. Then schedule your highest priority tasks accordingly.
6. Seek and give feedback on progress and impact. A key part of accountability is not just want we want to achieve, but also how we want to achieve it including the type of leader that we want to become as we strive to achieve our success. By seeking feedback on our performance we can make sure that we’re learning as quickly as possible as we go. By offering feedback out we are then helping others to do the same. And more than that, we’re starting to foster a feedback culture where learning is seen as a core objective, candour is valued and people can be more authentic and develop quicker. To help create this feedback culture, build retrospectives as a key part of the objectives setting process so that when you are at the end of a period, or when you have achieved an objective, your entire team can come together and learn what went well and where improvements a can be made in the future.
7. Hold people Accountable — You can’t just tell people they’re accountable — you need to be accountable for holding people accountable by holding everyone to the same high standards. And far from being an aggressive or overbearing tactic, it is actually one of the kindest things you can do because it ensures fairness and consistency of rules. Maintaining this blanket accountability serves three purposes:

• It makes sure everyone knows they will be held to the same standard of accountability for everything they do;
• It gives you an opportunity to provide support if people are struggling;
• It gives you the opportunity to celebrate people when they are going well.

As a leader in a high ambition start-up the single most important message, in my opinion though, is that accountability, and culture in general, starts with the tone at the top. Your leadership defines your culture. You need to be the role model that demonstrates and embodies the behaviors that you want to see in your organization. If you want people to take ownership, then you have to take it first, when you make commitments you have to be seen to meet those commitments. If you don’t, then why should anyone else be interested in doing so.

It is for this reason that, in my experience, accountability is the single biggest differentiator between successful and unsuccessful teams.

To help Start Up Founders and Leaders to become more successful and to create a culture of accountability, we’ve created the Accountability Dojo. The Dojo is a high-performance program in which members get clarity on their long-term goals and take consistent and aligned action to achieve them. We’ve helped dozens of start-up leaders to achieve incredible things and you can find out more here.

About the Author — Jake Wombwell-Povey is a prolific and impact-focused, venture capital investor, leadership coach, sustainability consultant, as well as ex-founder who works with dozens of sustainability and cleantech founders.

Jake is a professional impact investor at Vala Capital, where he leads their UK-orientated sustainability fund. Through the investments Jake has made he sits on the boards of a number of sustainability companies and advises countless more.

Jake is also a leadership coach to sustainability around the world and coaches clients from the Far East, Europe and North America in sectors as diverse as Hydrogen, Circularity, BatteryTech, Retail, Energy Storage, WaterTech and Media.

Jake is also an adviser and mentor to Third Derivative in the US, and Bethnal Green Ventures in the UK, as well as being on the steering committee at VentureESG.

Jake is a serial founder and has raised multiple investment rounds for his first start-up, Goji Investments, from notable investors including Anthemis and Axa Venture Partners.

Prior to founding Goji, Jake worked in corporate finance for one of the UK’s largest corporate finance firms, where we advised on several $bn of transactions across public and private markets for some of the world’s leading investment groups.