Key takeaways
- Accountability is keeping your commitments to people; responsibility is fulfilling your tasks, and the two are different.
- Nobody wants to be held accountable; leaders should help people be accountable by committing to their success.
- A safe place to work, where every voice is heard, produces ideas at scale; one company gets a suggestion per person per week.
- Values define culture only when they are lived and enforced, even for top performers.
- A PM without line authority relies on the organisation's values and on relationships to get follow-through.
About this episode
“If there's an accountability problem in an organization, there's also an internal relationship problem between the people working together in that organization.”
You’ve heard it 1,000 times: Team accountability makes projects run smoother. It’s true, it does. But why? Accountability is a personal issue. We are accountable to others, and it’s up to us and only us as individuals to hold ourselves accountable. To others. To our organizations. To our work. To ourselves.
There’s a lot more to it, and this interview with accountability and leadership expert, author, and speaker Sam Silverstein covers a lot of ground. It may even make you rethink the way you think and talk about accountability.
- What is accountability?
- The values that define an organizational culture
- How leaders can be accountable, and help people be accountable
- Team accountability and what it takes to get there
- Inspiring greatness in others
Resources mentioned in this episode: