The Four Mindsets

chapter 15 How to increase focus and accountability

As a manager, maintaining the accountability and focus of your team should be a top priority. Make no mistake, how you do this will determine your team's level of success — and yours. It will also directly impact whether or not people consider you to be an accountable and focused manager.

Accountable managers with focused minds consistently outperform others. Having absolute clarity about what needs to be achieved and a commitment to the tasks typically gets the job done.

Managers with higher levels of control (not to be mistaken for micro-management, which is quite different) usually have greater self-control and focus, stay composed and positive even in testing situations, think clearly under pressure, and anticipate problems, pressure and bottlenecks.

Remember, when control is lost, fear rises and emotions are triggered, undermining stability in performance and relationships.

Let's start with accountability.

As a manager you must ensure you build an accountable team, and to do this you must provide absolute clarity around your expectations. If people know what is expected of them in terms of tasks and time frames, then they know what they need to deliver and by when.

Setting the right expectations

Do this well early on and it is guaranteed to save you much emotional energy and time down the track. In our experience, most negative feedback conversations link back to the original expectations of an employee and are due to ...