Accountability: Behavioural Guidance
Description: An accountable person takes responsibility for their actions, decisions, and outcomes. They clearly understand and fulfill their roles and duties, being transparent about their work and ready to explain and justify their actions. They also face the consequences of their actions, whether positive or negative, and adhere to ethical standards. Ultimately, accountability fosters trust, improves performance, and supports a culture of continuous improvement within the organization.
Competencies: trusted, answerable, committed.
What Accountability is:
• Taking ownership of actions, decisions, and outcomes – yours and your teams. Not blaming others or making excuses when things go wrong.
• Providing updates and sharing relevant information with colleagues, superiors, and stakeholders, expressing concerns or challenges as they arise.
• Honouring deadlines, fulfilling promises, delivering results, and following through on commitments.
• Focusing on finding solutions rather than dwelling on problems. When faced with setbacks, approaching them with a proactive mindset, seeking creative solutions.
• Holding others to their commitments, encouraging mutual accountability.
What Accountability isn’t:
• Using accountability to blame or punish others.
• Avoiding other tasks by justifying them as not your accountability.
• Not looking for root causes of issues by only looking for alternate solutions to get around problems.
The way we behave in the workplace reflects our personal and organizational values. Because competencies relate more to what a person does than what a person knows, they are observable. From our value statements, we extract our individual values, competencies and behaviours; the expectations we have for every person in our organization.
This list is useful as a reference but is not exhaustive. The behavioral descriptors listed are to be used to generate thoughts about how the value is displayed when performed well on the job.
Team: News