It’s inevitable that somewhere along the way we’re going to unintentionally make a mistake or do or say something that harms or offends others. Some examples could include:
- Not meeting an agreed upon deadline
- Showing up late for team discussions
- Not using someone’s preferred name or pronouns
- Raising your voice
- Making a mistake or error when completing an assigned task
- Interrupting someone
It’s ideal when we can personally take responsibility for our mistakes. Helping team members learn to own their behaviour and immediately take steps to correct any problems means that no one else has to hold them accountable. However, sometimes we’re not even aware that our behaviour has caused harm to someone else. In this case, a process to respectfully hold each other accountable means that team members don’t have to rely on management to deal with issues that two adults can resolve themselves.
This is separate from a leader holding an employee accountable for performing their job adequately. For tips to help, see Performance management.
There are 4 key approaches to this strategy:
- Create a safe environment
- Lead by example
- Call in rather than call out
- Create a team accountability process
The calling in team members activity helps guide teams through this process.
Create a safe environment
To empower employees to take accountability for their actions, we need to make sure we’re creating an environment where it’s safe to do so. It’s important to remove blame, shame, and humiliation tactics and normalize the experience of making a mistake, taking accountability for it, and coming up with solutions.
We can cultivate safe spaces by being curious about potential challenges, frustrations, fears or concerns that might motivate someone’s decisions, actions, behaviours or language, instead of making assumptions about bad intentions. Actively seek out others’ opinions, ideas, and perspectives. Accept that your own opinions, ideas, and perspectives may be different from others, and work towards finding common ground and understanding.
Create a growth mindset environment by hosting mistake meetings. For the first few meetings, the leader can share a mistake or error they’ve made and ask team members to contribute possible solutions to the mistake. After a few weeks of building trust and modeling vulnerability, ask volunteers to share their own mistakes and work as a group to come up with solutions. Eventually everyone can join in.
When employees make mistakes in an environment where they’re at risk of being disciplined, shamed or humiliated, they’ll be much more likely to attempt to hide the error or blame others for it. Openly talking about mistakes without fear or reprisal fosters trust, transparency, and open communication. It also reinforces the fact that we’re human, we will all make mistakes but we have the opportunity to learn and grow from them.
Lead by example
Set the tone for what’s expected when we unintentionally make a mistake or do or say something that harms others. If we want our employees to take accountability for their actions, they need to see us actively doing the same thing.
When leaders make mistakes that impact others and they’re aware of it, taking accountability for it and committing to changed behaviours can help to protect your working relationships. A process you can use to take accountability is to:
- Acknowledge when your words and actions may have negatively impacted others
- Share the change you’ll commit to that will prevent it from happening again
For example, if you missed a meeting and it has affected others, acknowledge the impact (wasting their time, causing stress etc.) and share with them how you’ll try to avoid this in the future. You might consider saying something like, “I know you’re busy and I apologize for wasting your time waiting for me. In the future, I’ll set a reminder so I can let you know if I can’t make it.”
To learn more, check out Building trust for leaders where accountability is one of the 11 competencies.
Call in rather than call out
Call people in, rather than calling them out. Give individuals the benefit of the doubt by sharing your experience of their behaviour and asking if they can clarify their intention. Rather than judging or making assumptions or accusations, you can work towards a resolution that supports all parties. You can share what you need or expect moving forward and hold space for the other individual to share what they’re going to commit to doing differently.
But what if the employee has said or done something that has negatively impacted others, and they don’t seem to be aware?
For example, you’re in a team meeting and an employee raises their voice, disagreeing with an idea that another employee put forward. What do you do?
It’s not unusual for someone’s response to be to sit there in silence especially if this was unexpected and is the first time something like this has happened. They may not know what to do or say because they’ve never had to deal with this type of situation before.
So how can you call the individual in without shaming or blaming, and address their behaviour?
- Try to recognize that the person behaving inappropriately may feel overwhelmed or upset. Give them the benefit of the doubt by respectfully asking why they are so passionate about this topic. This brings their attention to their behaviour while providing an opportunity for them to explain or change what they are doing.
- Consider words and tone that are least likely to feel sarcastic or patronizing, and that most people would hear as respectful and neutral. Communicating with clarity and Choose your words are resources that can help with this.
Some examples of calling in could be:
- I don’t think it was your intention, but when you said [xyz] I felt [however you felt, for example, dismissed or intimidated or ridiculed].
- We’ve been working at this for a while and I think we should pause for a break. [Insert name of intense individual], can we chat for a moment privately?
- This situation seems to have gotten intense. I’d like to chat with you about it.
- Can we discuss what just happened so I can understand what your intention was?
- I think we both want to resolve this situation. I’d like to have a conversation about what we both need in order to move forward.
When we call people in, we hold space to listen, understand, and support. We give the individual the benefit of the doubt, and support accountability and changed behaviour.
When we call people out, we often remove the opportunity for shared understanding. This can result in the individual responding defensively, or feeling shamed or humiliated and withdrawing entirely. This can eliminate the opportunity for taking accountability and committing to positive change.
Create a team accountability process
Ideally, team members will hold themselves accountable by recognizing when something they say or do may have a negative impact on others. However, for any of us, it may be that our intentions were good and we were not aware of our potential negative impacts on others.
For this reason, collaborating on a way for team members to call each other in rather than call each other out can help build trust, respect and psychological safety.
The Calling in team activity is a process you can use to help develop respectful accountability. It includes suggested wording and a worksheet with examples for your team to use.
Additional resources
- Psychologically safe team assessment. This resource helps to assess how employees experience being a member of your team.
- Psychologically safe interactions workshop. These free workshop materials help show how behaviours might be interpreted as bullying, regardless of intent. They include a slide presentation, facilitator guide
- Team agreement process. This process is used in collaboration with adult team members to help them develop their own agreement about how they will interact at work. It is intended to support a high-functioning, inclusive and psychologically safe team.
- Conflict response for leaders. If there is existing conflict between employees, this process can help you create an agreement to hold both individuals accountable for their behaviours.
- Building trust for leaders. Learn how to show your employees you’re trustworthy by exploring these core competencies and behaviours.
References
- Woods, F. A., & Ruscher, J. B. (2021). ‘calling‐out’ vs. ‘calling‐in’ prejudice: Confrontation style affects inferred motive and expected outcomes. British Journal of Social Psychology, 60(1), 50-73.