How to Reinforce a Culture of Accountability

Your culture is an important asset, and you need to curate it every single day. Look for opportunities to reinforce the behaviors you want to see.

It’s not enough to just build a culture of accountability. You have to strengthen it and reinforce it every single day.

This is about the small behaviors adding up to that broader culture. The organization is going to behave in a manner based on what it sees punished or rewarded. If people see others covering things up or laying blame, and see those people getting ahead or even promoted, then people are going to behave in a manner consistent with that.

On the other hand, if they see that people are stepping up and accepting responsibility, and those behaviors get rewarded, people will behave that way. If people take responsibility for problems and say they’ve made mistakes, and that’s held up by management as, “This is great behavior,” people will behave that way as well.

You need to reinforce your culture every single day. Look for creative ways to do so. When I was a consultant, we had Firm Values Day. We would take all of our consultants off of client work for a full day, which was extremely expensive for the firm. And for that one day we would talk about our values. People would share examples of when they saw the values in action, or they would talk about when they violated the values and what they did to fix it.

Think about your organization. Are there opportunities to include conversations around the values and the culture in progress reviews? Can you use it as a lunch and learn topic? Or at your staff meetings? When people get promoted, hold up those opportunities to say, “This person did great work. They’re living up to our culture. This is what we believe in. This is what we want.” Others will look at that and say, “That person got promoted based on those behaviors. I want to behave the same way.”

Your culture is a very important asset, and you need to curate it every single day. So look for those opportunities to reinforce behaviors to drive a culture of accountability.

Want to learn more about building accountability into your culture? How about taking an entire course on it? Check out the video below to learn more about the course and get started. Or you can go directly to the course and start learning how to build accountability into your culture. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

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