Accountability Equals Love

There is a difference between management and leadership—and that difference is often created with positive accountability. If you have to manage your team members, you’re not leading them. What you want is self-motivated team members who choose to be productive, but how do you create an environment where that is possible?

The answer: you lead with love.

When holding team members accountable to their goals and responsibilities, it must come from a place of love and care. If you think about it, holding someone accountable means that you care about their personal success and you want to see them accomplish their goals. At the same time, you value their worth and their ability to fulfill their potential.

At first blush accountability might not seem like a demonstration of support. In my experience, most people view accountability as a kind of disciplinary action: this person or group failed in a particular duty, so I have to hold them to account.

But what if we altered our view of accountability to be a means of building up and demonstrating value, rather than pointing out failure? What if accountability was a demonstration of love?

Before we go further, we need to understand the important role accountability plays on a real estate team. Accountability is the one way you have to ensure that the team is achieving its goals. It is bigger than any individual on the team—even you. And it is not an extension of you as the leader, because you need to be just as accountable to the team as everyone else. Team members work not for you, but for each other.

Creating an atmosphere of equal accountability leads to an unambiguous work environment. Many people don’t reach their full levels of productivity because they simply don’t know what is expected of them. Not even the world’s greatest self-starter can get around that roadblock. Accountability creates clarity and awareness for everyone on your team to meet—and eventually exceed—their potential.

Accountability is also an impartial arbiter. If each team member’s roles are clearly defined and tasks and expectations are plainly explained, there should be no gray area when it comes to failures of execution. Accountability here should not be a means of placing blame; in fact, if all team members have the same understanding of expectations and are accountable to each other, they will know when and why they came up short. All you have to do as the leader is to constructively help them figure out how to prevent the issue from happening again.

Just as the presence of real accountability improves a team’s ability to perform, the lack of can seriously disrupt it. We’ve all seen work environments like this, where roles are not defined and everyone just kind of does their own thing. In such an environment, it’s hard to determine what needs to change when a ball gets dropped—or sometimes, whether a ball has been dropped at all. Teams like this can’t grow or reach their potential because they have no means of measuring and ensuring that growth.

This is why accountability equals love: by implementing real accountability, you are creating the ideal environment for the growth of your team. By implementing real accountability, you are showing that everyone on your team has equal value. By implementing real accountability, you are telling your team that you value them enough to want them to do their best.

Is this not love?

I invite you to think about the level of accountability on your team and how you express it. Do you use it for discipline, for calling out individuals and punishing mistakes? Or do you use it to build something positive, to demonstrate how much you appreciate the work that your team does? Adjusting your perspective on this vital principle will help you develop an unstoppable real estate team!

Verl Workman is the founder and CEO of Workman Success Systems, a real estate consulting company that specializes in performance coaching and building highly effective teams. Contact wssm@workmansuccess.com for more information.