Create a Culture of Accountability

During Safety 2013, David Maxfield of VitalSmarts delivered a session that focused on ways to build a culture of accountability. "A major barrier to creating an accountability culture is that most people don’t like holding others accountable, and they don’t want to," Maxfield writes in his proceedings paper. "But workplace safety is an area where the organization can connect to values that are already deeply held by their employees." Maxfield offers these steps for building accountability into organizational culture:

• Recognize the central role accountability plays in achieving every other priority. "When peers look out for each other, watch each others’ backs and hold each other accountable, it supercharges everything the organization strives to accomplish," he says. 
• Begin with workplace safety. According to Maxfield, high-accountability leaders often take "special care to connect accountability to the personal values related to workplace safety." 
• Define the vital behaviors involved in accountability. "These are the two or three clearly defined actions that capture the essence of what accountability means," Maxfield explains. "For example, someone might say, 'I speak up and hold people accountable for creating and maintaining a safe workforce, regardless of my role or position.'” 
• Focus on a handful of crucial moments—times and circumstances when it’s especially important to speak up and hold others accountable. "When leaders focus their efforts on this handful of crucial moments, instead of spreading themselves too thin, they can achieve rapid improvements." 
• Marshal a critical mass of all Six Sources of Influence. "The high-accountability leaders we studied aimed all Six Sources of Influence at improving the two or three vital behaviors in the handful of crucial moments," Maxfield explains. "They added an overwhelming combination of training, incentives, structural changes and social support to the personal motivation that was already there." 

If you weren't able to attend this session while at PDC, be sure to look for David's paper on the proceedings CD or look in the July 2013 issue of Professional Safety for information on ordering recorded sessions.