True Accountability – The Secret To Sustainable Success

Do you know the difference between being reliable and being accountable?

In this episode of “The Business You Really Want,” hosts Gwen Bortner and Tonya Kubo break down the concept of true accountability and why it’s crucial for achieving sustainable success in business. Learn the key differences between tracking, reliability, and accountability, and how fostering a culture of non-judgmental accountability can transform your business operations and outcomes.

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True Accountability – The Secret To Sustainable Success

Now what I want Gwen to do is I want Gwen to educate all of us, including me, on what true accountability is and how it fuels sustainable success because I’m not going to lie, I’m one of those people who did not go into business for myself to be told what to do by other people. I’m resistant to this, but you know me well enough, Gwen, to trust you that when you tell me it’s good for me, I will take the bad medicine. Tell me what is true accountability, and why should I care?

Understanding True Accountability

The first thing that people get wrong is they think being reliable and accountable are the same thing, which they are not. You can be completely reliable and not accountable, and you can be completely reliable and accountable. Accountability takes two people. Reliability is about an individual but people will conflate the two, thinking that if I’m doing the stuff that I’m supposed to be doing, I am accountable, or they will say, “I’m accountable to myself.” No. If you look up the actual definition of accountability in Webster’s Dictionary, it will say “reporting to,” and you can’t report to yourself. You can think about it, but it’s not the same as reporting to. It takes two. Minimum of two but you can use more. It takes two to have true accountability.

Part of the true accountability that makes the difference that is, it’s not just reporting, but that the person that you are reporting to, or people but the person that you are reporting to cares about your result, and then they are also owning part of this relationship. It’s not like, “Send me the information, and I will keep track of it for you.” That’s not true accountability. Saying, “I noticed that you haven’t sent it,” or saying, “I saw this happen, let me give you some feedback,” where I’m paying attention to the details of what the back and forth is of whatever we are being accountable about that’s where true accountability happens.

It’s not just checking it off like a task list. That is not true accountability. That’s tracking, and that’s data, and that’s information, and how I feel about data and information? I love that stuff, but that is not real accountability. Real accountability takes both people caring about the result of the person who’s being held accountable, and it does take at least two people, and it does take a back-and-forth in our action, not a one-way interaction.

You’ve taught me three things now. You’ve taught me tracking, which is like, “Done or not done. It’s my list of things, I did it, or I didn’t do it.” Then there’s reliability, which is, “I said I was going to do it, so I did,” or “I trust that person’s going to do the thing that they said they would do.” Accountability is related, but it’s this whole other thing that isn’t independent. You said that’s key. It has to involve at least one other person, and there has to be some back and forth with it.

The reason I’m making the face I’m making is because mentally, I do this all the time. I run everything through a use case in my brain, and it always looks like I’m rolling my eyes at people when I’m thinking, but I think of all the accountability groups out there and all the ones I have been in. I have been in the accountability group where my job was. At the beginning of every week, I was supposed to write out my task list like, “These are the things that before my head hits the pillow on Friday, I’m going to do these things.” I have had one where it was the end of the week, where I was supposed to report on everything I did this past week.

Beyond Acknowledgment

In some cases, when somebody was looking at many of those cases, the bounds of the program were simply, it would be checked off. My name got a check mark because I did the thing, but nobody circled back with me on any of it. In other cases, they circled back, but it was like, “Good job. Good job doing the thing you said you would do,” but nothing else. Not an inquiry, and maybe like, “What came up that I wasn’t expecting,” or any type of examination. When you are talking about the two-way conversation, it sounds to me like part of accountability is also not just, “Did you do it,” but that exploration about what else came up. Is that accurate?

I will say it’s accurate for my definition. This is where probably other people would argue with me and say, “No, that’s not needed,” but for me, true accountability says, that not only are we making sure that the thing that we are doing is getting done, but we are also examining and I like that word that you use. “Examining” is a great word for it that we’re examining what was done and saying, “Was that the best thing to do?” Did we learn anything from it?

Sometimes we don’t learn anything from it. That’s okay and maybe there’s not a lot to examine that can be true but for me, part of the accountability is doing that examination on an ongoing basis. Sometimes it is about, “Nice job. We got something done.” Everything doesn’t have to have this deep, important meaning because I did not have to live like this, but there are things that do, and not paying attention to that means that you aren’t being held accountable.

To me, we often can’t see the things that have meaning for ourselves unless someone has asked us to think about it because we are entrepreneurs, we are busy, we are doing anything, or we can’t see it for ourselves because sometimes it’s hard to do true self-reflection. I don’t care what anyone says. It’s why therapists exist. It’s hard to do true self-reflection. That to me, that’s part of what the accountability is for someone saying, “This seems interesting. You might want to pay attention to that.”

Accountability Vs. Micromanagement

I hear you and I believe you, and yet I can also imagine. Fine. Pull from my recollection examples of business owners who would resist that because they would feel like micromanaged. Help me understand what you are describing, not micromanagement. Maybe you could say, “It would be micromanagement if we did this, but it’s not when we do that.”

To me, micromanagement has a couple of key elements that I don’t necessarily see in accountability. One of them is, it must be done a specific way or it is wrong. That is micromanagement. It’s not where we are starting here and this is the result we need. It’s, “You’ve got to do this step, this step.” That’s micromanagement. That is one of the first and key definitions of micromanagement.

The other is that we are checking in all, so at every step. That also is micromanagement. That we are saying, “Did you do it?” “How about now?” All of that is micromanagement. Accountability is saying, “Did you get the result that you wanted to get? If you didn’t, why not? Is that a problem, or is that not a problem?” Micromanagement would pretty much always say, “That’s a problem,” because I’m expecting this result. Accountability is like, “I didn’t do the thing that I was going to do,” and to be able to say, “Is that a problem, or is that not a problem?” Say, “No, it’s not a problem. I realized that I was doing this because someone told me I should, and it’s not going to move my business the way I want to move it.” That’s outstanding accountability, but has nothing to do with micromanagement.

A quick follow-up question is, do you think the motivations behind each are different, or do you think the micromanager thinks they are holding the person accountable?

Often a micromanager feels like that’s how you hold someone accountable. There’s a whole giant conversation that we can talk about why that may be and all the rest of it. We don’t need to do that, but I do think people feel like that’s accountability. Where part of my definition is, we are looking at what was the result, and what did we learn about that particular result? Is that whether it was a result we expected or not? Based on that, what do we need to know going forward with it? That is a very different accountability.

Now I understand how micromanagement and accountability are different. I also understand the difference between tracking reliability and accountability. I want to ask, “What’s the big deal? Why does this even matter?” Rather than ask that, I’m going to be much more specific with you and ask, can you give me an example of where your definition of true accountability, when put into action, made a difference in a business?

Weekly Course Of Action

I can give a great example without revealing very many details. Quite honestly, we work together. I have been using an accountability process with my clients called the weekly course of action for years now. One of the things that was interesting is the first thing I noticed because, at first, it was completely voluntary, and I wasn’t strongly encouraging it but the first thing I noticed was the clients that went through the process regularly which isn’t this giant process, but they were every week going through the weekly course of action process were making progress faster than similar clients who weren’t. What I realized in that process was that taking a little bit of time every week for the self-reflection aspect that we have in accountability was allowing them to make better decisions faster than continuing to do the same thing that wasn’t necessarily providing the results they were looking for. That’s very generic.

We had someone come in who was only doing the accountability aspect with us. They were not getting any one-on-one coaching or any of these other things and they said at the first quarter review period, “I got more done in this quarter that is moving the needle on my business than I have in the last two years.” She said, specifically, “I knew someone else was going to look at my report and give me feedback.”

It wasn’t because I didn’t know how to do any of these things. She said, “I have not needed help in that capacity,” but knowing that someone else cared helped her do the things I needed to do.” She said, “I knew if I did get stuck that there was someone who was going to give me some good advice on options or things to consider or a resource or something else. It wasn’t that I would be stuck in there. I knew there was someone on my side.”

Creating Feedback Loops

Your real-life example then, is taking that business owner who likes all things being equal. They were not doing things any differently than they were doing before except for reporting their activity or their goals and then having somebody mirror that back to them, read it, respond, and reflect with them. What I’m hearing there is there’s a piece of us that, if we think we can hide or we think nobody will find out, are not as motivated to do the things and I don’t want to say the things that aren’t fun because there’s a lot of aspects of business that aren’t fun that people go about doing all the time, but there are certain things that are easier not to do if nobody’s watching. Can you think of specific aspects of business that are true?

I do think it’s true for a lot of the operations of the business because very few people, except for a few weirdos like myself, find the operations fun and interesting. They find the customer interesting. They find the product interesting. They find the service interesting. They may even find the marketing and the sales process interesting. Even when they say they don’t like it, they still find it interesting because it’s creative, it’s innovative, and they get to use all of their skills. A lot of times, the operations are a little more mundane, repetitive, and not as exciting.

No one’s giving you kudos when you’ve cleaned up your books because no one knows that you cleaned up your books other than you and possibly your accountant and so, there’s a lot of stuff on the back end that doesn’t get the same feedback loop. I think a lot of those things are the things that people know need to be done, but they don’t do. Not because they aren’t capable, not because they don’t know what’s important, not for any of the reasons but they are not getting that feedback loop that’s helping them move forward with their process.

I’m thinking through all the things going on. I wouldn’t want to clean those up if nobody was going to pay attention, because those things are not fine, and I want gold stars when I do fun things. If nobody is going to notice that I didn’t do it, they are not going to give me my gold stars.

We know this. The process of action we know. If you are reviewing it, you give them gold stars because you are the emoji queen but I’m not even giving emojis you know, party hats and you know the champagne bottles and the thumbs up and all because we all are kindergarteners at heart. We all want gold stars.

I’m a big fan of the heart eyes and the star eyes, in addition to the party hat, because I feel like when was the last time any of us got a sticker? Emojis are my version of stickers. One more question that may take us a while to go through, but it’s important. Do you like how I preface that? It’s okay if you have to talk along with that before I ask the question. When it comes to establishing accountability, I see that it could be possible for somebody to start on this path and do a lot of things wrong. We have already addressed one of the primary mistakes, which is confusing or conflating accountability with micromanagement.

Common Accountability Mistakes

Do not decide tomorrow you are going to hold your staff accountable, and in holding them accountable, you start to ask them what their process is for processing through their email each day. You are not going to win any friends if you do that. Do not let them do their email however they choose. All that matters is, did they respond at the appropriate time? Aside from that, where one mistake is starting to micromanage versus practicing true accountability. What do you think are some other mistakes that business owners would make?

The first one popped into my head and I’m sure there are others, which hopefully will come into my head as we do because as an extrovert, I’m processing as my mouth is moving. There’s a good chance more will come to me. The first one is the other end of the extreme of micromanaging, which is saying, “Did you do it? Okay, good,” which for me is fundamentally the opposite end. It is the checkbox that says, “That would be great.” Still, no processing of it. Not everything in life constantly needs to be processed. Let’s be serious about that as well. We don’t need to process everything all the time.

Looking at the accountability in the yes or no is not true accountability either. It is about saying, “What did we learn from this? What do we know about this? What are some pieces of information?” Not on everything, every time, all the time, but things that are feeling core at the moment. This is the important part at the moment to the business. Certain things are core to the business today that won’t be core to the business in four weeks because they are super smooth, and so the checkbox that we do is all that we need.

When things are not feeling quite right for whatever reason either should it take more time, should I take that time, or are our customers happy? Are they not as happy as they should be? Any of those things that we think are touching that. To me, that’s where that reflection piece of accountability comes in. Not only did we do it, but could we think about it differently? Could we try something different? Do we need to be doing all of these things, or could we make some things? Should we be doing more things? It’s all of those pieces and being open to that thought process all the time. That is the real piece of accountability and, like I said, the opposite extreme is making it so performative that we don’t ever get there. It becomes the task list.

It sounds to me like part of this practice of accountability, and establishing accountability is you have to recognize that. Did you do it, or did you not do it? That’s a starting point, but that’s not the only part of it. Also, doing it isn’t always automatically the win. Sometimes it is. Sometimes you are supposed to make ten calls on outstanding invoices, and you don’t want to do it because these are uncomfortable conversations. On one hand, making the calls is a win, but how you have those conversations, and I would imagine the relationship you have with the other person on the other end of the conversation, is also an important piece to document in this accountability process.

Let’s use that as a great example. Luckily, this is not a problem that we face within my own business, but let’s pretend because it’s a great example. Someone needs to make ten calls about past-due invoices. Did we do it? Yes, but did we hear anything consistent? For instance, they are not receiving the invoice at a place where they are paying attention. They don’t realize that they haven’t paid the invoice. That’s a good accountability piece not for making the call, but saying, “What I’m hearing is out of 8 of the 10 people don’t even remember receiving the invoice.” That means we have got a different issue there. We’ve got a root problem that we need to address because my guess is at least half of them probably would have paid the invoice if they had gotten it.

Paying attention not only to doing the thing but saying, “Is there anything I learned from that?” The answer may have been no. If we are processing 1,000 invoices a month, and 10 of them didn’t get paid, they are the random ten that didn’t get paid this time, for whatever reason. Making the calls was the thing that we needed to do. It also could be something that in three weeks, you notice that all of them were paid except for one within a week of that call. It’s like, “Making these calls is important.” It’s about bringing things forward into our consciousness that we may not know we need until further down the road.

Fostering A Culture of Accountability Without Micromanaging

That’s important too. What seems important now, may not seem important later but that true accountability function helps you figure that out. This is good. Anything else that you think a reader should know about true accountability? I do feel like you talked about it differently than other people.

First, I will say, I never realized it until you and I started working together.

I was like, “Wait. You are a unicorn. I never hear this.”

That was also helpful because it was like, “What is different?” I will say, the first is, that I or someone on my team is going to read every weekly course of action document every week, and they know that. If I’m out on vacation for three weeks, then usually, Tanya, it’s you, but also Andrea, who is technically the person doing the “I’m checking the box,” piece. You did it. I’m thinking a couple of weeks ago, as she was checking the box, she noticed a comment and said, “Let me reach out to you. I’ve got some resources on this.” Not her job, but because we use this accountability within our team, she’s used to looking at it, she’s used to thinking about it, she’s used to responding and when she saw that she could help, she immediately did that. Which is back to creating this ongoing behavior for everyone.

It opens the door for people to help each other out because you are not so siloed.

You are not seeing it as a criticism. It’s not, “You didn’t do this. Shame on you.” “That didn’t happen. Is there a reason? Do we need to fix it? Is something broken? Do we need to be doing it at all?” It changes the conversation. One of my very early-on customers, who was doing the weekly course of action exclusively, described it as non-judgmental accountability. That’s the thing that’s important that we don’t approach it as, “What you did was wrong,” or, “You have failed.” You get an F. We only give gold stars. We don’t give Fs.

Key Questions For Effective Accountability

Instead of approaching it with “right or wrong,” “yes or no,” or “good or bad,” those things which often people assume accountability is if I didn’t do the thing that I’m bad, I’m wrong, I failed. Accountability and this maybe is part of the thing that makes what I do different than for some is to say, “Why? Why didn’t you do the thing? What’s preventing you? Was it important?”

We are asking other questions, not saying, “Obviously you failed.” We have had folks in their accountability process have something that they were going to do this week and next week, the week after that and the week after that. For a few weeks, life happens. I don’t get too excited if someone doesn’t get something done in a few weeks but at some point, it’s like, “I noticed this is continuing to get pushed to the next week. Do you know why that is? Is it because you are stuck and you need some help? Is it because you don’t know how to do it? Is it because you realize that maybe it’s not that important? Do you need to even keep it on here at all?” We are asking questions without saying, “You suck because you pushed this particular item for 5 to 6 weeks.

“You promised you would do it this month, and you have not.”

Yeah.

Takeaways

Let me recap quickly, but thank you for this, Gwen. I say this at least every third episode but I feel like this one could be the most valuable one to date because if you’ve been reading all the way through, you now know the difference between tracking, between accountability. I have already forgotten. What was it? Tracking. There’s accountability. Reliability. We all now understand the difference between accountability and micromanagement and where we landed, that is so important because we went through a few different mistakes that a lot of people make but the big one is the judgment piece. When not only do you need somebody else to work with you on your accountability because it has to be a two-way street but that person has to either be non-judgmental or they need to be able to communicate their questions in a way where you don’t feel judged.

That is an important one to land on. What I would love is for you to email me because we are all about the conversations around here. Both me and Gwen. Email Tonya@EverydayEffectiveness.com. I would love to know your experience with accountability. Have you had this true two-way reciprocal relationship that we have been talking about in this episode? Has it looked different? What do you think about that? No judgment, no blame, no shame but very interesting to have that conversation. Thank you again, Gwen, and we will see you next time.

Mentioned in the Episode

About Your Hosts

Gwen Bortner has spent four decades advising executives and entrepreneurs in 45+ industries. She helps women succeed in business without sacrificing happiness by identifying their true desires and aligning their business functions. She spots overlooked bottlenecks and crafts efficient plans toward sustainable success that center your values and priorities. Known for her unique approach to problem-solving and accountability through the G.E.A.R.S. framework, Gwen empowers clients to achieve their definition of success without sacrificing what matters most.

Tonya Kubo is a marketing strategist and community builder who helps entrepreneurs build thriving online communities. As co-host of The Business You Really Want and Chief Marketing and Operations Officer (CMOO) at Everyday Effectiveness, she keeps conversations on track and ensures complex business concepts are accessible to everyone. A master facilitator with 18+ years of experience in online community building, Tonya takes a people-first approach to marketing and centers the human experience in all she does.