To thrive in this time of increased business complexity, leaders are transforming their leadership teams to become more adaptable and resilient, more customer-centric, and more innovative. This more agile leadership culture relies on shared team accountability, in which team members hold themselves, and each other, accountable to achieve common goals. Enabled by trust, ownership, transparency, and cross-functional collaboration, shared accountability enables agility by delivering these benefits:
- Enhanced flexibility through collective investment in outcomes rather than individual performance metrics. This distributed team responsibility also creates multiple sensors for detecting problems and opportunities, accelerating decision-making and enabling faster adaptation.
- Broader cross-functional perspectives that enable proactive problem-solving. Understanding how their work connects to others’ responsibilities reveals new opportunities, and helps to better anticipate and respond to challenges proactively rather than reactively.
- A safer environment for innovation and calculated risk-taking. When the entire team owns outcomes together, members feel safer experimenting with new ideas and novel approaches.
- Dynamic leadership functions that shift based on specific challenges. Shared ownership enables leadership to shift between team members for given circumstances, based on expertise, context, and immediate needs, creating organizational resilience and flexibility that traditional hierarchical structures cannot match. It also provides built-in redundancy that maintains momentum when some team members are unavailable.
Barriers that inhibit the development of shared accountability in leadership teams include:
- Hierarchical mindsets: Traditional command-and-control leadership strategies cause team members to wait for direction rather than taking initiative.
- Unclear goals and expectations: Without crystal-clear shared objectives and well-defined team success metrics, accountability becomes diffused and ineffective.
- Lack of trust: Without trust and safety, team members hesitate to hold each other accountable or speak candidly about challenges.
- Lack of transparency: Limited access to information across functions prevents team members from understanding how their work impacts others and the overall goals.
- Inconsistent leadership modeling: When senior leaders don’t demonstrate shared accountability themselves, it signals that the concept is just rhetoric rather than a genuine priority.
- Misaligned incentive systems: When KPIs and rewards primarily focus on individual achievement, they naturally drive people to optimize for their department rather than collective outcomes, undermining shared accountability.
- Fear of failure: When mistakes are punished rather than treated as learning opportunities, team members become risk-averse and avoid stretching beyond their defined responsibilities.
- Time pressure: The perception that collaboration takes too long can push teams toward faster but siloed decision-making, especially during crises.
- Competency gaps: Some team members may lack the cross-functional knowledge or interpersonal skills needed to effectively participate in shared accountability.
Shared accountability develops team members, builds team cohesion, encourages initiative, and enables the team to pivot quickly when needed, strengthening team agility and improving results.
How could shared accountability strengthen your team’s agility?