As Trusted Advisor, your primary role is leader of your Deliverables Team.  This leadership implies one of your major responsibilities is to serve as an Accountability Coach to your Deliverables Team and to your Community of clients to help keep everyone focused on accomplishing those things which help clients actualize their road maps.

When establishing clear accountability processes, keep in mind: Accountability means different things to different people.

The term “accountability” is used quite loosely in conversation.  For our purposes, accountability resides in an individual, not in a process or a company. So, individual people are held accountable rather than groups or larger entities. 

To be held to account implies there are consequences.  But, again for our purposes, simply giving an assignment to an individual is not the basis for accountability.  Rather, it is the acceptance and agreement by an individual that the responsibility for a thing resides with them which initiates accountability.

Consider this: if you eagerly accept a task or dearly want something, you naturally anticipate your willingness to be sufficiently focused on it to envision seeing the thing through to completion, right?  You would, then, welcome help from others to maintain adequate attention on it and would appreciate those around you alerting you when your focus wanders too far from this thing for which you are now responsible, right again?

In its purest and best form, this is accountability; being willing to allow others help remind you of the commitments you have made to yourself and others. 

To clarify, accountability is not necessarily the offer of permission for others to criticize you, though the word criticism is often misused also. In its purest form criticism should mean to look at critically as in to analyze dispassionately.  But when individuals criticize each other, it is more often an act of passing judgment, fault-finding or censure,; none of which any individual enjoys.  So, rather than permission to criticize, let's view accountability as willingness to:

• Help us measure success
• Help us identify improved courses of action and solutions
• Help us identify necessary course corrections and
• Point out to us (with caring and patience) when our actions appear out of alignment with what's necessary for the responsibility we have accepted

All good and helpful perspectives to have when offered by an individual who:

• Has no "axe to grind" with us
• Sincerely desires the "best result" from our efforts
• Is not angry or impatient
• Wishes us success
• "Has our back," and is loyal to the relationship (even when it comes to "telling us the truth")

Now, personalities are such that, even with this understanding of the supportive nature of someone else helping to hold us accountable to the commitments we've made to ourselves, for a variety of reasons, some members of your Deliverables Team may view accountability as negative. You are encouraged to, at first, not view this as resistance or an attempt to shirk responsibility.

Help your Deliverables Team embrace the positive power of accountability and the advantages to them of having another member of the team help them to better focus on their priorities and commitments.

Accountability coaching among team members is a gesture of kindness and commitment.  Rather than resist it, Deliverables Team Members should be encouraged to contemplate more and better ways to offer reciprocal consideration to their fellow team members.