Does your company play the hot and cold game when trying to find solutions or create something new? You don’t have time to research, so you just try as many ideas as possible to see if they seem good or not? It’s like throwing a bunch of things against the wall to see what sticks.

Promote Accountability and Creativity through Process

Some leaders are comfortable with the hot-and-cold approach because they are not able to commit time to planning up front. They wrongly assume that it will be faster to let you just figure it out and keep coming back to them for directional feedback.

This causes frustration for employee, manager and anyone else working on the project. A good worker doesn’t want to waste time; they want to make progress. And trying the same thing over and over again in different ways without any direction sure feels like a waste of time.

According to Brian Tracy, every minute of planning saves 10 minutes in execution. That may not seem like much at first but, it equals out to a 5-hour time savings for every 30 minutes you spend planning. That could apply to both the manager and the employee working on the solution, which would equal out to 10 hours there.

So what’s a better way? Look at the current and future state of what you want to fix or achieve. Talk about it, make sure everyone involved understands it, and plan how everyone can be acccountable.

• Outline the current state together.
• Identify the area you plan to improve.
• Discuss possible solutions.
• Select a solution that is universally agreeable.
• Plan, do, check, and act.
• Turn the new actions into a standardized process.
  
  

That is a very simple structure for building team accountability will save hours of time with any project or task. Why does this work?

• It focuses energy and creativity on the actual problem you’re trying to solve, not just the symptoms.
• It provides guardrails, keeping you on track to minimize confusion and reduce chaos.
• It reduces administrative and redundant tasks, freeing up brain power for higher value tasks.
  
  

With this process, no one’s wasting their time with trial and error of things that will never work and aren’t even what the boss is seeking. It will help establish a culture of accountability, which is critical to achieving long term success.