Do you have accountability issues in your company? If you said "No," you're in the minority. Accountability is usually one of the biggest issues that hold organizations back. However, people talk about a lack of accountability and yet I find that many don't really know what is meant by the word. Let me see if I can help.

Have you ever struggled with letting someone else do something that you can do faster, better, and with less effort? If you really think it through, you know that if you don’t pass the task on, you'll be doing it yourself forever.

If this task is in fact the best use of your time, then maybe the staff member isn’t needed. But if there's a better use of your time, then you have delegate it to someone else who will do it slower, not quite as good, and with more effort. You have to let go of the vine*.

How much of your week is spent doing these types of tasks?

Here is a great story from Les Brown where he draws an interesting analogy.

One day, a man was walking down the street and sees a dog on a porch that was just sitting there, whimpering, whining and moaning. The man was curious as to why he was whimpering, so he went and knocked on the door and a guy came out and said, "Yes, how may I help you?" He said, "Sir, is this your dog?"

Over the last 11 years I have had my business, Nexus, I have probably said this phrase, “Good people in a bad system look like bad people” 300 times (if you are one of my big math people that is just about once every two weeks). The impetus of the saying goes back to the first year of Nexus when I was working with a local client.

I recently read an article in Fortune about Tim Cook, CEO of Apple. This article focused on Tim and his leadership approach (Fortune voted him the best leader in the world this year).

In the article, Tim shares about his thoughts on culture or the core of a company. I liked his take on it. He said, “The culture of a company to me defines how excellent it will be, how helpful it will be, how ambitious it will be, how innovative it will be. But, if there’s self-honesty in the culture, [it also defines], how quick it is to admit the mistakes that every company makes. There is a whole set of things. Does the company have integrity or not? Does a company desire to do something more important than simply make money? Is there a reason for being, and do the employees really get the reason for being?”