Accountability and Incentives.

Written By Dena Black

If I do good work or bad work and get paid the same, what is the incentive to do better?

You cannot establish accountability without having an incentive plan for achieving milestones.

Holding your teammates or colleagues accountable is fundamental within a good working process. Being accountable means, you are expected to justify your actions or decisions.

It DOESN’T mean punishment, knowing something isn’t working in a process and saying that something went wrong is not a failure on a person’s ability to act, it’s a failure of the process to be able to account for variation.

We have to remember “Process not people”, which means we need to ensure mistakes don’t happen and not blame the person doing the work. Human failure accounts for 2% variation in a given process, if its more than that I would assume you have some continuous improvement to work on.


Dena Black

Dena Black is an Operational Excellence consultant with over 10 years of experience leading enterprise level process improvement and transformation initiatives. She partners with leaders to improve performance, accelerate execution, and embed sustainable ways of working across complex organizations.

Dena is a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and SAFe 6.0 certified professional with deep expertise in operational efficiency, standard work, and scaled continuous improvement. Her work focuses on aligning strategy to execution, reducing cycle time, and enabling teams to deliver measurable business outcomes.

In 2025, Dena was named a finalist for the Kaizen Academy Kaizen Award in recognition of her impact and leadership in continuous improvement. She is known for her pragmatic, data‑driven approach and her ability to translate operational rigor into results that matter at the executive level.

https://Leanonmeconsultingservices.com
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