Accountability and get things done for founders
How can founders instill a discipline of accountability within themselves and foster such a culture in their startup?
Founders of startup companies know that it’s no secret that startups lack the structure and formalities of their larger business counterparts. It’s simply more work at the beginning to foster a company culture of hard workers who stay on track when that’s not already built in. “Creating mechanisms to keep yourself accountable to your vision, goals, and tactics can be one critical ingredient to help you realize your startup’s ultimate success,” Verizon says. Although it can seem like a challenge, business gurus of all types highlight how essential startup accountability practices are for founders, employees, customers, and overall.
Moreover, as Techstars says, when you start to build an accountable culture and organization, it isn’t hard, but it does take work and patience. It isn’t always straightforward and you need people motivated by some incentive. The easiest way to make accountable behavior part of your startup’s DNA is with consistency. You, the founder, must be accountable to your teams. If you skip taking time to review data and provide meaningful feedback, it becomes time that your team wasted.
If you schedule a time to review progress each week, month, or quarter, the people looking up to you will not only follow but seek out ways to improve themselves, too. Cause and effect rules; if you want people on your teams to go above and beyond, you have to start with yourself and your awareness. Then, hire people who are excited to follow your example and you’ll end up with an all-star team!
We found a great story from an author at Techstars, who tells us about his experience with business management and organization from a young age. As a 7-year-old entrepreneur, he went door to door with his cousin selling carpet samples as doormats. “I didn’t understand the concept of accountability at that age, but I did understand donuts. A donut truck drove around the neighborhood every afternoon.” Every morning he decided which donut he was craving that day, and calculated how many carpets he would need to sell.
It was the promise of a delicious cinnamon roll or glazed chocolate that kept him motivated to meet his goal. He didn’t always get his donut; rather, his cousin often missed his goal and asked him for some loaned money for his donut. He admits, “Because I had less organizational savvy back then, I didn’t hold him accountable. Resentment grew, corporate goals went unmet, and our doormat empire didn’t even last the summer” (Techstars). This is a real consequence of poor communication and the execution of goals.
The author goes on to share that he started another business in his basement 25 years later: the stakes had changed from donuts to a family and a mortgage, so he wanted to get it right. “I had cofounders counting on me. While my day-to-day role as CEO was strategic, I also had to figure out a way to sell our services.” He goes on to say that the cofounders of the company weren’t salespeople, but they all took it upon themselves to establish a weekly sales quota.
Each Monday at 10 AM, they would meet to share their weekly goals and accomplishments. “Accountability comes fast when there is nowhere to hide. Not only were everyone’s achievements written on a whiteboard for all to see, we had to stand in front of our team and say it out loud” (Techstars). In today’s fast-paced world, accountability is an essential piece of the puzzle when your startup is in the beginning stages. Founders should create a company culture of success, or a negative and problematic company culture will be created for you!
We have included some short instructions from Innovation Footprints’ article on how to best reach accountability within your startup. In order to foster an accountable company and employees, the leadership team must be well assigned and they must obtain confirmation that the audience “gets it.” Firstly, set clear expectations.
Do individuals understand what their anticipated outcomes are? Then, understand your team’s capabilities and resources. Do they have what’s required to meet and surpass their desired goals? Next, think about clarity of measurement. Does the team know how their performance will be judged?
Clarity of feedback is extremely important, too. Make sure that everyone understands and practices open communication in both directions in order to avoid surprises later on. Do the leaders or executive officers understand the necessity of checking in periodically and forming part of the team’s progress? Lastly, clarity of consequences: “Does the leader/manager have clarity around what must happen if the preceding 4 conditions have been met and yet the outcomes fall short of the expectations that the team has set for itself?
A key piece in this is that “the leader/manager has to be honest and sufficiently self-critical in order to ensure accountability traps do not keep arising “out of nowhere”… Under the worst circumstances some individuals have to be let go, but that is life” (Innovation Footprints).
Why is that important?
Let’s say your startup is doing well; the product is decent and improving, sales are increasing, turnover is growing, etc. You’re preparing to do big things next month. However, there’s one small issue: accountability. Everyone is not always on track with what they should be doing, things aren’t falling into place on time as they should… there is no culture of accountability.
Perhaps it’s not fatal yet, but it could soon be. Accountability ensures that at all levels of a company, people are doing their jobs efficiently, proactively, and well. Without this culture at a startup, nothing will ever get done long-term.
“One way to distinguish between leadership and management is to remember that; in the grand scheme of things, leadership affects issues that are of strategic, relatively long-term importance to a startup, while management by comparison focuses on issues of tactical, and relatively short-term importance. It means that a manager typically will be responsible for implementing a strategy and vision developed by the leader.
Leaders focus primarily on creating a vision, developing a strategy to actualize the vision, and nurturing culture. Managers draw up detailed plans, discuss the plans with the leaders to get buy-in and approval, then they make decisions and implement those plans with the help of people on the teams that they manage.” (Innovation Footprints).
Things can often become confusing in startups, when founders, the real de facto leaders, also must take on the manager’s responsibilities. That is until the structure of the organization has developed and the startup leaders’ distinctions of roles are clear. Different individuals should be assigned to each set of tasks, based on their skills; both startup leaders and managers. However, in its beginning stages, a higher number of employees is not always a possibility, so the startup leaders must be resourceful.
Some leadership traits that they should have included are being focused, punctual, responsible, and creative. Making sure that you have people in roles aligned to their traits will help the organization and accountability flow much more naturally. Once you have instilled that sense of being held accountable, your organization will make huge leaps toward beating out the competition. A well-oiled machine made up of accountable, transformational leaders can make a big splash in the market.
Regardless of whether you’re in the early stages of your business startup, or as you’re making progress things become more complicated, and the chief principles of accountability don’t change. The most important thing to remember as a founder is that you are the first to be held accountable.
It should not be a tough decision to give your startup your full effort. However, as a Techstars article says, “If you’re not all in, then no one else will be either. “It’s not my job” isn’t a phrase you’ll ever hear me say. You might see me roll up my sleeves and ask, “How can I help?” “What can we do to make this right?” or “What can I do better to support you next time?’”
Secondly, accountability is challenging because you have to establish clear objectives. If the executive officers don’t succeed in this, the entire team is confused and thrown off track, failing the task at hand. Therefore, it’s imperative to go slowly and fully understand what you want to accomplish. Techstars advises: “As an example, to increase sales by $100, do you want to make a $1 sale to 100 customers, or a $10 sale to 10 customers? These are very different goals. Figure out what you’re really trying to achieve, then make sure the goal is time-bound and measurable.”
Another easy step to take in your company’s accountability journey is to align the team and individual goals with your overall strategy. If the startup’s objective is to hit a certain revenue number, then each person should have personal goals to reach that objective.
For example, the sales team should focus on a pipeline goal, the service team will be figuring out how to reduce churn, and the marketing team should produce high-quality content. The legal team might have a goal to turn around the sales contracts in a limited number of hours. Think outside the box for ways that each person working at your business can positively impact your mission strategy.
Another piece of strategy provided by Techstars is to create a dashboard. “Record your goals, share them, and review them regularly. The last thing I want is for someone to show up with a complete miss at the end of a quarter. I’d rather see the trends along the way so I can intervene and help correct the course before it’s too late.
This could be as simple as a weekly or monthly stoplight chart you create in Excel or Sheets.” Along with this, don’t be afraid to have meetings weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly, etc. Large periods of time aren’t necessary, just do a check-in to make sure things are running smoothly at every level of the business.
One approach that will help is to ensure that your team is phenomenal from the beginning. Hire wonderful people and give them the autonomy to do their job. If they say they will complete a task, believe them. Still, as a manager, it’s crucial to take total responsibility to hold employees accountable for fulfilling their responsibilities, and actually for meeting the high standards set by the culture. Founders might find it useful to experiment with these tactics and strategies in their startup businesses. Taking the initiative to give out appropriate roles and highlight peoples’ accountability is essential to your vision of success.
What are some strategies?
As the business world becomes increasingly fast-paced and cutthroat, your company’s level of accountability should be improving exponentially, too. No weak links should hold your startup or company back from complete success, at any step in the process. Here are some strategies and tips to put you on the best track toward meeting and exceeding your goals.
To begin, you definitely want to separate the CEO role from that of the chairman. Public companies are increasingly adopting this trend, as it is recognized for fostering good governance. In the case of multiple co-founders, each can take a different position, allowing for balance and equal power plays. Contrastingly, you could find an independent director to play the role of chairman. They would provide an outside perspective.
The second thing you could do is to recruit an advisory board. These can be extremely helpful in providing skills that perhaps the CEO lacks, and raising their awareness of blind spots. Also, if you agree to work with an advisory board, you automatically commit to working on business opportunities and areas that you’re less familiar with. Diversification is always a good idea!
Moreover, you’re going to want to join a peer advisory board. As one article from Verizon says, “It can be tremendously helpful to get feedback from other entrepreneurs facing similar challenges by participating in a peer advisory group. I’m a skeptic-turned-fan of an advisory group in Washington, D.C., Netcito, which convenes monthly. Entrepreneurs hear about and respond to the big thorny issues of their peers – and keep one another accountable for taking steps to resolve them.”
This is just one fantastic example of accountability across the industry even between competition. It might not be a bad idea for your startup to consider. You could also find an individual coach, who can keep you on track while taking on specific issues that might affect how you manage the company.
Check out the International Coach Federation or similar network forums. You could also privately commit to your goals by writing them down on a yearly basis, or you could find a venture capitalist/angel investor. A good investment partner can give your business a meaningful push upwards (Verizon).
So what else can you use to your advantage on the journey to success? What about technology? Innovation Footprints says: ‘The tools of accountability — data, details, metrics, measurement, analyses, charts, tests, assessments, performance evaluations — are neutral. What matters is their interpretation, the manner of their use, and the culture that surrounds them.
In declining organizations, use of these tools signals that people are watched too closely, not trusted, and about to be punished. In successful organizations, they are vital tools that high achievers use to understand and improve performance regularly and rapidly.”
Keep in mind that preparedness is everything; take copious amounts of notes so nothing is missed or overlooked. Praise in public, reprimand in private. With the goal of solving problems, don’t get angry or embarrass employees in front of their peers. Resolve the issue without hard feelings and the team will stay functional.
Ask endless significant questions, too: “What seems blindingly obvious to the manager or the leader may not be so obvious to the individual team member responsible for executing the assignment and delivering results” (Innovation Footprints). Teams should understand the Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How of what they’re doing. The leadership team should know to ask these questions constantly to hold people accountable.
All in all, accountability is not an unachievable dream. Many of the most successful startups and companies have revealed that one secret to success is holding people accountable for their jobs, beginning with the founders holding themselves accountable. This way, things simply get done more efficiently. Following the strategies and advice outlined in this article will help your teams stay focused and motivated to get your startup to the top!