Accountability

- The only way to ensure your initiatives get completed is to hold people accountable. Every single initiative on your prioritization list should have a very clear initiative owner. One person you can hold accountable for delivering results on that project. You'll need appropriate reporting and metrics to be able to tell is the initiative on track or not. If an initiative is scheduled to deliver say, a million dollars by the end of the year, and by June you're at 50,000, you should probably know that as soon as possible so you can take appropriate corrective action to get that initiative back on track. The reporting and metrics are a critical element of driving accountability. And those initiative owners must be held accountable for managing the plans and delivering results. If they're not delivering, you as their leader need to find out why. And if they need resources, your job is to provide them. If they're not meeting expectations, they need your guidance and coaching and counseling to help them do so. Now, many times you're going to defer on an opportunity or pass on something because you don't have the resources available that you can hold accountable for driving the overall strategic agenda. Sometimes you may be tapped out on your project managers. You don't have enough of them to do all the projects, so you take the one gigantic project and perhaps defer it for three months. And move some smaller ones up in the queue, because you do have the resources to do it. And again, then you'll be able to identify the individuals who own them and hold them accountable for delivering those results. By establishing clear accountabilities, you're able to balance the initiatives across your portfolio to make sure they get done, and you're going to ensure that you get the results that you're promising back to the organization as part of the strategic planning process.