Personal accountability means accepting responsibility for your actions, words and behaviors and their consequences. Often, we have an initial impulse to pass the blame or cover up our mistakes, but personal accountability requires that we resist that urge. Holding yourself accountable for what you do and say can deepen your personal and professional relationships while continually improving yourself.
Many leaders throughout history, from political figures to current enterprise leaders, have professed the importance of personal accountability. Former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt emphasized her view on the continuous nature of personal accountability: “In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.”
Personal accountability can be uncomfortable at times, but embracing it allows you to deepen your personal and professional relationships, work toward achieving life and career goals and engage in individual growth and development in all aspects of your life. Below, we’ll explore the multifaceted aspects of personal accountability and how it impacts different aspects of life and career.
Private Life
Taking personal accountability is a core part of engaging in everyday activities, decisions and relationships in your personal life. Explore how it can deepen relationships and support your personal growth goals.
Personal Accountability
Personal accountability in your private life means taking responsibility for your choices and behaviors and how they impact yourself and others. Each day, we make tons of micro-decisions in our personal lives. Some of these can foster self-growth or enrich our relationships, while others may have adverse outcomes that negatively impact our relationships or inhibit personal improvement.
One example that most of us can relate to is the need to stay accountable for household tasks. If you live with a roommate or partner, you need to keep yourself personally accountable for contributing to household chores to keep your space clean. Doing the dishes and vacuuming isn’t much fun, but intentionally prioritizing these tasks and taking accountability if you do lapse in household responsibilities can help you maintain positive roommate and family relations.
Personal accountability in your personal life may also involve keeping up with commitments that you’ve made to yourself or others. It’s frustrating and hurtful when you make plans with a friend and cancel at the last minute. You’ll want to avoid those situations and show accountability by keeping your commitments whenever possible, communicating changes promptly and apologizing sincerely if you are late or have to cancel.
Empowerment In Your Private Life
Personal empowerment is the idea that you are in control of your life and decisions. We all encounter hurdles that can make us feel powerless in our personal lives, but empowerment allows you to adjust your mindset and perspective to overcome those challenges.
Personal accountability serves as a catalyst for empowerment, enabling you to pursue goals and overcome challenges by accepting that you are ultimately responsible for your actions, decisions and words.
Taking Responsibility
Taking responsibility for your actions and their consequences in your personal life is extremely important in cultivating integrity, self-respect and trustworthiness. When you hold yourself accountable for your choices, you show friends and family that you can be trusted and will act with integrity.
On an internal level, taking responsibility also helps you grow as a person. When you deflect responsibility and make excuses, you deny yourself the opportunity to truly grow and learn from your mistakes.
Self-Awareness In Your Private Life
Self-awareness is the ability to perceive and recognize your thoughts, feelings, values, actions and personality. It’s about identifying what makes you who you are and how that impacts your individual experiences and interactions with others.
Self-awareness enables you to understand how your values, strengths and areas for growth impact your decisions, words and behaviors. This allows you to better understand and take accountability for what you do. It also fuels personal development by helping you understand what you could do better on an individual level.
For instance, if you’re aware that you’re experiencing thoughts of self-doubt that are holding you back, you can actively work on incorporating positive affirmations into your routine and seek ways to get out of your comfort zone and try new things.
Setting Life Goals
Personal accountability fuels progress toward achieving the life goals that you set. Taking up a new hobby or learning a new skill requires work. You need to be accountable to yourself by exercising the discipline necessary to work continuously toward your goal. This may mean showing up to lessons, working out or practicing, even when you’re tired and have had a long day at work.
A survey by Preply found that 82% of Americans planned to set personal growth goals for themselves going into 2024, but on average, 3 in 4 people abandon those goals. Using the SMART goal method is one strategy that can help you remain accountable when setting goals. SMART goals are goals that are:
- Specific: Narrow in on exactly what you want to achieve. Instead of saying, “I want to run more,” you could pick a short local race you want to train for and complete.
- Measurable: Decide how your goal will be tracked and measured. How will you monitor your progress or know when you’ve fully achieved your goal?
- Achievable: Choose goals that are realistic and attainable. You can often break down larger goals into smaller, more manageable goals.
- Relevant: Create goals that are relevant to your personal or professional aspirations.
- Time-bound: Set a specific timeframe for your goal. Giving yourself a deadline will help you stay accountable.
Following these five steps and setting measurable goals with deadlines or milestones makes staying accountable for your life goals easier.
Professional Life
Learn how taking personal accountability in your work life can impact your career and lead to professional success.
Professional Accountability
Personal accountability plays a key role in our professional lives and work affairs. Professional accountability is showcased through actions such as meeting deadlines, delivering high-quality work and fostering positive relationships with colleagues. It involves taking ownership and responsibility for your decisions, work and how you communicate and interact with others in a professional setting.
An example of taking professional accountability would be looking for ways to make things right when you fail to meet a customer’s expectations. Taking ownership of the failure, apologizing genuinely and working with them on a satisfactory solution could allow you to salvage the relationship and retain their business. If you didn’t display professional accountability in that scenario, you would likely lose out on any future business from that customer and may even receive negative reviews.
Professional accountability is also a core trait of an effective leader. In Culture Partners’ Workplace Accountability Study, 84% of survey respondents indicated that how leaders behave is the most critical factor influencing accountability within their organizations. Remember that you don’t have to be a CEO to be a leader or impact your organization’s culture; demonstrating accountability can have a ripple effect within your team regardless of your position.
Empowerment In Your Professional Life
Empowerment is the authority or autonomy you are given to do something. In the workplace, this can be the authority to take initiative, make decisions when needed and manage yourself more autonomously.
Exercising personal accountability shows those around you that you can be trusted to work hard and follow through on your professional obligations. This allows your manager to empower you to take on more responsibilities, make decisions and work more independently. Personal accountability is also part of what makes a good leader, so demonstrating this attribute can help drive your career forward by showing that you have what it takes to be an effective leader.
Taking Responsibility Professionally
In addition to the countless daily decisions made in our personal lives, we make many in our professional lives requiring accountability too. If one of those decisions negatively impacts others or the business overall, it’s important to accept responsibility for the outcome and its consequences. For most of us, this happens on a small scale. You take accountability for missing a deadline and inconveniencing your team or a client or acknowledge that you should have communicated more clearly to a subordinate to avoid confusion.
Sometimes, this happens on a larger scale. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek recently took accountability for his business decisions that led to company layoffs. In a statement shared with internal staff and published to Spotify’s website, he explained the thoughts and actions behind his decisions, taking ownership of the outcome:
“Like many other leaders, I hoped to sustain the strong tailwinds from the pandemic and believed that our broad global business and lower risk to the impact of a slowdown in ads would insulate us,” he said. “In hindsight, I was too ambitious in investing ahead of our revenue growth. And for this reason, today, we are reducing our employee base by about 6% across the company.” Ek added that he took “full accountability for the moves that got us here today.”
Another benefit of demonstrating personal accountability in your professional life is helping to create a culture of accountability at work. Taking responsibility and being honest about mistakes in the workplace may be nerve-racking, and many people are hesitant to do it.
However, modeling professional accountability for your employees and peers can help normalize open and honest expressions of accountability. It also contributes to your professional development and self-growth in your career. It allows you to act as a support system for others as they navigate their accountability journeys.
Self-Awareness In Your Professional Life
Demonstrating self-awareness in your professional life is key to your success. It’s one of the reasons that hiring managers like to ask the classic interview question, “What is your greatest weakness?” They want to see that you are self-aware enough to identify and acknowledge an area where you have room for growth and are willing to work to improve yourself. Self-awareness can help you grow in many areas of your professional life by fostering adaptability, emotional intelligence and effective communication skills.
Being self-aware at work also allows you to be proactive rather than reactive when dealing with problems. For example, if you know your time management skills could use improvement, you can proactively seek help from your manager in prioritizing tasks and better organizing your time rather than missing deadlines and making excuses after the fact. Managers and peers will appreciate it when you display self-awareness and the desire to improve.
Embrace Self-Accountability For Personal And Professional Growth
Cultivating personal accountability within yourself can enrich both your personal life and professional success. Personal accountability contributes to being a good friend, a reliable and trustworthy employee and a great leader. Start embracing personal accountability as a blueprint for achieving your goals and fulfilling your potential in all aspects of life, and see how it allows your relationships and career to flourish.
Personal Accountability FAQs
How do you take personal responsibility at work?
You can demonstrate personal accountability at work by meeting deadlines, taking responsibility for your decisions and following through on your professional commitments.
How is personal accountability measured?
Personal accountability can’t always be measured quantitatively. However, certain aspects of self-accountability, such as meeting deadlines or making measurable and timely progress on your life goals, can be used as metrics for measuring accountability.
How do you improve and show personal accountability?
There are many ways to develop and demonstrate personal accountability. A good starting point is developing self-awareness to better understand the beliefs, ideas and personality traits driving your behavior. Then, you can take greater ownership of your behaviors and how they impact yourself and others. To better develop accountability in your everyday personal and professional life, practice being communicative when you need help, can’t meet a scheduled commitment or deadline or when you make a mistake.
What are the three habits of personal accountability?
The three habits of personal accountability are thinking ahead, owning your commitments and focusing on solutions rather than passing blame. Thinking ahead means looking at what needs to get done, considering the timeline and planning for any potential roadblocks you may encounter in completing a task or activity. Owning your commitments means following through on what you say you will do and taking ownership if things go wrong. Focusing on solutions is about rising above the urge to pass blame or make excuses and instead putting your energy toward finding a solution.
What is an example of being personally accountable?
You can find examples of personal accountability everywhere in your personal and professional life. One example is proactively communicating when you’re unable to meet a work deadline and taking ownership and responsibility for the delay.
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