When I talk to small business owners, the conversation almost always revolves around the question, “How can I hold my people accountable?” The immediate response I give is “Tell them, measure them, and then trust them.”

Now I know that it is a big step and it is not easy, but trust is a fundamental part of the process. Let’s examine this in a little more detail. By now, we all know that accountability grows from a two-way process.

i) The owner/manager must clearly define their expectations and delegate the required authority. This is the part of the equation that most homeowners don’t get right. There are no job descriptions, benchmarks, agreed goals, definition of good performance;

ii) Measurement processes must be in place so that both the owner and employee can determine if expectations are being met. This is where we need to have some job costing process, some physical measurement that everyone understands. This doesn’t have to be expansive or a major task, but it should be enough that both parties can agree when performance is up to par.

Both of the above requirements sound great, but let me give you a real world example. A masonry contractor has only one primary performance metric: the number of bricks. These vary depending on the type of brick or block, but can be reasonably fully defined. So you set up a reporting system that collects details of the counts and now you can hold your site supervisors accountable for achieving those numbers on an overall site, and they can hold their masons accountable for individual performance.

So now we come to trust. If you meet the two requirements above, it’s much easier to trust that all is well. If not, your measurement will tell you. Now you don’t have to rush to the job site every day, and those endless phone calls, when you should be concentrating on your driving, are a thing of the past.

And a funny thing happened on his way to the golf course for the first time in years, his supervisors felt good. They know what to do, they know you know they’re doing a good job, and they feel responsible not to let you down, and most of the time they won’t. But if they do, you’ll soon find out and be able to deal with it!