Accountability is a factor in every business decision. One of the biggest takeaways from No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyers, is the cultural workplace success in giving your team members ownership over their jobs. If you are confident in your team’s abilities, you should not have an issue giving them ownership over their jobs to make necessary decisions. Even if you disagree with their decisions or strategies, you should trust their judgments because they were hired to be experts at their jobs.
Hiring Your Dream Team
The best advice we give business owners is to hire based on character. Many people would disagree with this advice, but it works every time for us. What we mean by this is to build your team around crucial characteristics like someone dependable, trustworthy, hardworking, forward-thinking, and loyal. People are generally easier to train to do a specific job than to be reliable–that is not something you can teach a person to do.
Once you have established your team and trained appropriately, you can consider your key players. Hastings and Meyers discuss how most of your team should be key players, which they refer to as talent density. Talent density is the ratio of talent per employee. Check out our blog post on talent density to learn more about how to develop this strength in your workplace.
Hiring and compiling your dream team is so important because you, as a business owner, must be able to run an efficient and productive workplace. You should delegate work appropriately and trust that your team performs each job as efficiently as possible.
Who is Accountable? Your Team, Your Experts
How much trust do you have in your team? You should be confident in their abilities and decisions if you have already put together your dream team. If you know you have already hired a team with desirable characteristics, they have been trained correctly in your company, and they are experts at their jobs, then your team members will be more likely to make the best decisions based on their knowledge.
Allow your team members to be experts in their positions and allow them to make the ultimate decisions in their fields. The most significant advantage of doing so is it increases accountability. Team members will feel a particular obligation to make the best decisions for the company if they are the ones liable for the outcome.
Risk It All
Some decisions may be harmful. Some decisions may be great. The thing to remember is that there is nothing gained without risk. I know, scary, right?
Employees must be encouraged to weigh the risks and make the best decisions for the company’s best interests. If a decision failed, what would be the consequences, and what would you learn? If the decision succeeds, what do you have to gain?
With that in mind, Hastings and Meyers suggest that you should not fire your team for taking a calculated risk and having a not-so-great outcome, but rather for not taking a risk. Risk-taking is the only way to see your company surpass expectations and thrive.
In conclusion, risk management is part of decision-making. Business owners and managers should take accountability for their hiring decisions, but team members should take responsibility for their choices.