This article by our Founder and CEO, Chris Pollinger as published by Inman News shares insights on fostering team accountability.
Fostering them accountability is the single most important key to increasing the per-person productivity (PPP) in your organization. There are a number of effective strategies you can implement to drive higher productivity and create accountability within your team. Transparent reporting, timely feedback, and one on one coaching all have their place. But there is one technique I have found in my twenty-five plus years that has surpassed anything else in efficiency and effectiveness. It’s group accountability in the form of a collaborative master mind meeting environment.
The secret sauce with these team meetings is the round table nature of them. Everyone’s voice gets to be heard and everyone’s voice matters. This is also a place where people can open up and share in a safe and confidential arena. The Team Leader is the facilitator, who also leads by example in accountability.
Depending on the size of the team, weekly or bi-weekly meetings work best. An hour is sufficient for teams under ten members. Block an hour and a half for up to twenty. More than that and you will want to start splitting the team up into smaller groups. It’s perfectly acceptable to mix your agents and staff into one group.
Here’s the format we have found to be unbelievably effective.
Fostering team accountability starts with the sign in sheet, white board or other visual for everyone to check in on. We have them write their name, then rate from one to five (five being the highest) on how they are feeling at that moment about these four areas of their lives.
- Business Health
- Financial Health
- Physical Health
- Relational Health
Next to those rankings we have each person bring an issue they are dealing with that is standing in the way of a goal they have.
Spend seven to ten minutes on an inclusion exercise.
At the beginning of the meeting, everyone in the group has one minute to share a positive personal or professional event since the last meeting. Not only does this build comradery, but also it sets a positive tone for the meeting. The key here is the leader shares first and the depth of what is shared will be followed by the example of what the leader does.
Spend ten to fifteen minutes on best practices.
Go around the group and ask who has business success stories to share. Celebrate the wins and ask how did they do it. This is a great way for the team to learn from each other. It’s a critical step in the accountability process. Accountability often gets a bad rap as a negative. The celebration and recognition of achievement is the positive side of accountability.
Spend ten to fifteen minutes reviewing action promises.
At the end of each meeting, each person is going to commit to one thing they are going to do before the next meeting. This is where we take out the promises from last meeting and check off action promises completed and applaud those who kept their commitment to the group. For those that missed the mark, ask them if they’d like to push the undone commitment to the next meeting or whether they would like to commit to a different goal. The beauty of doing this in the group is that the group will call each other out on excuses. The goal here is not in public shaming, but to demonstrate a culture of accountability.
Spend twenty to thirty minutes processing someone’s problem.
The leader reviews the sign in sheet and chooses one or two of the most urgent topics, or those with commonality. The person who wrote down the issue gets to be in the spotlight.
Step one is to define the issue. Have them try and define it to a single sentence.
Before any suggestions are offered, step two is to clarify the issue. Here the group can ask questions, not to solve, but to understand what is really at the root of the problem. An example of this is someone saying, “I can’t find time to prospect.” Through clarifying questions, the real issue might be “How do I get over my fear of rejection.”
Step three is having the person re-state the problem in a single sentence.
Next, step four is where the group will offer suggestions.
The last step comes when the suggestions are evaluated, and the person can commit to implementing one of the ideas before the next meeting.
Spend seven to ten minutes on new commitments by the next meeting.
Fostering team accountability ends with the leader writing each person’s action promise, including their own, on a sheet. This will be brought back to the next meeting to be reviewed in front of the group.
This one system has surpassed anything else in efficiency and effectiveness in my twenty five years’ experience. The master mind meeting environment fosters individual and group accountability in a collaborative and positive environment. Do you want a copy of our turn-key mastermind system to implement and tweak for your team? You can find it here.
