Responsibility vs. Accountability vs. OWNERSHIP | Team Performance | HR and Business Leaders

everybody's trying to drive performance of their team and everybody's having a tough time getting people to actually perform i'm sure you're feeling the exact same thing the question is why because i think we look at it the wrong way we're so focused on the responsibility piece which we have to have people need to know what they're going to be held accountable to they have to have their responsibilities think about it in terms of a job description we lay out everybody's responsibilities and we should but if all we focus on is response on the responsibility and

holding people to responsibility and then we think about why they're not performing they're not going to take ownership at that point so we've got to give them responsibility we've got to sign it and we should accountability is the next piece so many leaders are actually afraid these days to hold their teams accountable to the responsibilities they've laid out in the first place and what happens if you give them the responsibility but don't hold them accountable you're in essence telling people it's not as important as i said so you don't have to do it so anything

i ask you to do at this point you don't have to do because i'm not going to hold you accountable to it so we've got to have the responsibility we got to hold them accountable to it the third piece is the ownership piece and this is what ceos ask me about all the time what i've even thought about all this time is how do you get people to actually want to take ownership and this is the key you can assign a responsibility as we've talked about and you should you can assign accountability and you should

but you can't assign ownership people need to take it and in order to do that you've got to create an environment where people want to take it because you can't by design force it ownership is something that we choose to take and as leaders we've got to focus on one thing and that's creating that environment starting with responsibility moving into accountability but then creating a situation where people choose to give their best