The Accountability Principle and Engagement
Accountability is a very weighty and quite personal concept. It is burdensome and liberating at the same time. The accounting it calls for is a first person accounting, not a disinterested bystander’s report. Accountability obliges the person in charge to tell her own story. And in the telling, she is expected to know clearly what she is trying to accomplish and why that’s important in the larger scheme of things. Starting with the results her actions have produced so far, she is expected to go deeper and give her analysis of what accounts for those results: what forces are at play and what she has done to manage those forces; where there are shortfalls or overruns and what she’s done to overcome their causes. She is expected to demonstrate that she is monitoring and evaluating what is going on all along the way: exercising judgment, seeking counsel, soliciting help and making adjustments to overcome unforeseen obstacles and to compensate for unintended consequences.
Interestingly, the rewards and losses associated with being an accountable person are many; and they are experienced every day, not just at the end of a project, or a quarter, or a year. That final payoff or loss is critically important because it affects a person’s possibilities - his future and his broader life beyond this job. It affects both reputation and wealth and, therefore, expands or contracts the horizons of his life - the things he can do and the interests he can explore. But, accountability is also an intensely emotional thing. A person experiences accountability as an energy welled up within him. He feels the pressure of that point in time when he’ll have to tell the story of what he’s done. He wants the story to be a good one, the story of a hero overcoming daunting forces. His awareness expands to take in everything affecting his goals and becomes keenly alert to threats and opportunities, with a hunger for all sorts of situational information. He feels concerned about other people: do they know their responsibilities and are they all doing their parts. He feels concerned for other people: how are they feeling about what they’re doing and how are they holding up when the pressure is on. He feels worried about resources: are there enough and are they being used well. His mind is a flow of checklist questions. Have all the right communications been made? Are all the parts of the job getting done? Are the customers satisfied? Will we meet our objectives? The accountable person experiences the emotional rewards and losses that are evoked by the multitude of step-by-step successes and failures as he carries out his mission. In fact, this is a major reason why the accountable person seeks out accountable jobs - to experience himself handling all of the challenges presented by the quest for some specific measure of success, important to himself and others. This experience of handling a myriad of challenges - sometimes not so successfully, but then recovering and learning for the next time - is as important to a person’s internal possibilities as the final financial and reputational rewards are to his external possibilities. It is in the day-to-day tests that a person comes to know his own internal horizons - his current and expanding capabilities.
So, accountability is a simple yet exceedingly powerful concept when used systematically throughout a business.
- It becomes the motive for people to achieve and maintain a big picture view - what are we trying to accomplish and how do all the parts fit together to make that happen.
- It becomes the motive for measurement of progress and results - how can you evaluate the situation without measures?
- It becomes the motive to develop and implement constructive changes in order to tell a story of success.
- It funnels all of the wisdom in the business to the transaction level as each person is in turn accountable to another.
- It becomes the network of conversations that drive the ongoing modification of strategy and redesign of processes to better pursue the overarching objective.
Tags: Accountability, Alignment, Assessment, Collaboration, Confidence, Human Capital, Learning Culture, Measurement, Performance, Strategy
June 13th, 2008 at 11:30 am
Tom,
in your article on accountability, you mention a well-executed plan, yet there is no mention on measures of success. It is assumed that executing the plan will bring about the results? Isn’t there an element of accountability that says the results must be achieved and they must be measureable so that you can truly say that the actions were appropriate. Isn’t it hard for a person to be accountable for an effort when there is no clear measure of success?
June 16th, 2008 at 8:06 am
Hi Dorothy! Thanks for your comment. I completely agree with your rhetorical question: “Isn’t it hard to be accountable for an effort when there is no clear measure of success?” A point I made when summarizing the benefits of having to regularly give an accounting of progress and results was “It becomes the motive for measurement of progress and results - how can you evaluate the situation without measures?”
So, at least as I see it, the performance plan includes activities and results; and results are stated in terms of measures and/or observable outcomes. Accountability - providing a regular accounting of your work - includes both content - what’s been accomplished or not - and context - why we’re getting the results we are - along with what, if anything, more, less, or different should we be doing? In the holistic accountability mind-set, it’s important to constantly do some analysis around the measured results - what’s driving those measured results, does something need to be done to sustain them or improve them, are there opportunities or threats that are seen now but weren’t taken into account in the original plan or in any modifications of the plan to date? Conversations like this between a person and their manager or team leader or partner can create better and more sustainable results and deveop talent more fully at the same time. Let me know what you think and what your experience is!