Accountability vs Blame

At Two Twelve Advisors landscape business consultants, we understand the importance of fostering a culture of accountability in the workplace. 

Navigating the differences between accountability vs blame can be difficult but is crucial to your landscape business team and will help with employee and employer relationships.

Accountability and Blame are similar in their conceptualization, but there are key differences that every landscape business owner or team lead should know:

Accountability is rooted in positive intent. This means taking responsibility for one’s actions, decision-making, and any potential pitfalls or obstacles that may arise from making important decisions. It means working towards correcting mistakes and improving behaviors to make a change beneficial to yourself and others. 

Blame is usually driven by negative intent. This could appear as openly faulting a coworker for their mistake without looking to the future for a constructive solution.

 Here are some valuable tips to help you promote accountability in the workplace, improve employee relations, and enhance transparency in the workplace. 

Accountability in the Workplace - It starts with You!

Before you can hold someone else accountable in the workplace, you have to hold yourself accountable. This means more than being privately accountable. This looks like owning up to your mistakes in front of your team. If you don’t follow through, say something. Apologize and make it right.

When you demonstrate your personal commitment to become more accountable in the workplace, your team is more likely to follow by positive example and see it as necessary to their work environment.

Promoting A Healthy Employer/Employee Relationship  Through Accountability

In the same way, before you can ask your team to hold each other accountable in the workplace, you have to show them how to hold others accountable. Once you have made it a habit to own up to your mistakes in front of the team, you can start holding others accountable.

There are several ways and areas in the workplace to do this. An example of Accountability vs Blame would be kindly bringing  up any protocol breaches or if someone is falling behind on their quarterly target. Just remember to approach it with a friendly and helpful attitude.

Transparency in the Workplace and Positive Intent

One of the biggest differences between blame and accountability is the intent. While blame comes from an intent of avoiding fault and placing it on someone else,accountability comes from positive intent - you want the other person to improve and succeed. If we aren’t accountable for our actions and responsibilities, we will not succeed.

As a manager, your goal is to foster an environment of transparency, positive culture, and openness on the basis of trust, accountability, and see each individual on the team succeed.. If you approach accountability this way, employee relations can be preserved and demonstrate an attitude and expected behavior of fairness, respect and communication between employee and employer.

It is important to be respectful of others' feelings when you hold them accountable. We have found it is always best to have had a private conversation at least once with the individual, before holding them accountable publicly.

Making Accountability in the Workplace Routine

At this point you have started holding yourself and your team accountable and done it with positive intent. Now it is time to help your team get comfortable with holding each other accountable. It is best to do this by making accountability routine, until it is normal for everyone.

Integrating Accountability into Meetings for Better Transparency

One way you might approach this is by implementing methods of accountability into your meetings. If you have regular team meetings, structure a portion of it to address outstanding tasks or potential blockers and open the floor to potential troubleshooting or operational solutions..  You may also implement a portion of your meetings being dedicated to reviewing everyone’s progress on their goals or metrics.

Accountability in the workplace, improved employee relations, and communication based on trust and transparency, when properly embedded into a company’s culture, can make a massive difference on their efficiency and productivity.

When you set a personal standard of identifying the differences between accountability and blame, you will see an increased motivation among team members to complete tasks quickly and accurately. Additionally, when you feel comfortable holding your peers or coworkers accountable for their actions, you can prevent unnecessary delays caused by their inaction or obstacles. 

If you’d like to have a conversation about accountability in your landscape business , reach out today!