When you’re running a small business you’ll need to provide leadership to ensure your business success. That also means deliberately setting some standards that you want to meet with your business to build a profitable business culture. Leadership is not just a fancy word bandied about in the corporate arena of big companies. It is the glue that holds a team of people together, if applied in the right way.

As a leader you are also accountable, not just to yourself but to your crew as well. Gone are the days when you could bark your instructions to an employee without any obvious repercussions. Besides ticking off your employees, who really are your most valuable business assets, you are not doing your business any favours by behaving in unpredictable ways.

Being a leader is not just about the habits you practice in front of others. It is often about the habits you practice behind closed doors that make you an easy person to follow. When both are in line with each other, your chances to have a highly productive team working with you and for the benefit of the business are so much higher.

While accountability can be a touchy subject that can make many people feel uncomfortable, it protects you as a leader and can exponentially increase the level of influence you have over your company culture and your employees.

Here are a few ways you can develop the kind of accountability that makes you a better leader.

Set clear expectations for yourself

As a leader, you need to have a clear set of expectations of what you will do and what you will never do. This can go for your personal life as well as your professional life. If you are going to be an accountable person, you need to know in no uncertain terms what you are accountable for.

Establish an accountability partner

Establishing an accountability partner is as simple as finding a person you trust, telling them the expectations you have placed on yourself and asking them to follow-up with you regularly to ensure you haven’t lowered your standards. It is also quite common that people have more than one accountability partner for different areas of life or business.

When it comes to managing your business financials, it is especially important to have someone you are accountable to. The ideal person for this is either your bookkeeper or accountant. They can help you establish best practices that will definitely meet the standards you’ve set.

Establish a board of directors

Depending on the size of your business, your board of directors could be employees that are on the payroll, or it could be other like minded business owners that volunteer as advisers. Many tradies turn to their bookkeeper or accountant to find help talking through some tricky situations with someone they can trust.

Your board of directors need to have a bit of business sense and they need to be easy to reach in crisis. Should you ever find yourself in the position of having to make a big decision quickly, accessing your board of directors to ask for their advice or discuss alternative courses of action is a great way to stay accountable.

Allow the people you lead to question you

Allowing employees, contractors or business associates to question your methods, does not mean you are allowing them to question your authority. If you are working with someone who is feeling uncertain about a leadership practice you are modelling, you should establish an open-door policy and allow them to ask difficult questions. Use your best judgment to determine how to respond to their questions and be as open and honest as possible.

Hold yourself to the same standard you hold others to

As a leader, you want to know what’s going on in your business. There are several ways to get insight into how people are spending their time on the job. In the construction industry there are also many ways you could be taken for a ride by your employees or subbies. Some leaders might invest into monitoring devices, but that’s not always the best way.

If you establish standard work practices, develop procedures and policies that your employees can follow, you’re building a culture that doesn’t need to rely on big brother-type approaches. The most important thing is that you model these practices to set the standard. That way you also can work out very quickly, whether someone is trying to deceive you, because you know exactly what it takes to do a certain task.

As intimidating as developing accountability looks from the outside, it is a truly valuable asset that no leader can afford to be without. Accountability can also protect you from legal backlash and disgruntled employees. When you make an effort to be the same leader behind closed doors as you are in front of those you are leading, they will know you are a trustworthy person who is worth following!

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