Accountability Moves Mountains
When talking with a finance director of a major UK-based retailer it was clear her major frustrations were: people not taking responsibility; senior managers and key employees ignoring ownership; and individuals avoiding accountability. Facing tough business conditions, she was seeing an increase in blame-culture and the number of excuses playing a part in many conversations in the organisation.
She focused on the increase in the volume and quantity of denial, causing not only frustrations but damaging productivity. This at a time when the enterprise needed to be working most effectively given the outside forces creating these toughest trading conditions in a decade.
Clearly she was looking for a solution to these identified challenges. Our experience, working with large, medium or small enterprises over many years, is the need for accountability. Defined as being: ‘required or expected to justify actions or decisions’ by the Oxford Dictionary, ensuring people are accountable drives an individual’s sense of ownership and responsibility and works against blame, denial and excuses.
When reviewing people in your organisation, you will almost certainly be looking to see them exhibit accountability for their actions, and indeed being accountable for any damaging in-action. You will want them to strive for and attain objectives which have been agreed with their supervisors and definitely want them to accept responsibility for their own behaviour and their job-related tasks. But how many of the people in your organisation are like this?
A major lesson for us all is the need to encourage recognition for a job well done, measured against objectives which are agreed in regular evaluations. This will alleviate the need for any reaction by management to manipulative gossip and rumour, which are often part of a culture where accountability is not encouraged or stimulated. This then invariably creates suspicion which leads to intrusive micro-management, disrupting culture and can cause consequent damage to the future of the organization.
Finding someone who accepts the consequences of their own performance is a great asset in any team; someone who clarifies with their supervisor the expected behaviours and results associated with their role and establishes agreements with others as to how success will be measured.
Those who want to be seen to be accountable will deliver beyond expectations and consistently encourage others to do the same; people with personal intrinsic motivation, measuring themselves against a standard of excellence. This standard may be one’s own best past-performance (striving for improvement), an objective measure (attaining results), the performance of others (staying competitive), tough goals, or even something no one has ever done (striving for innovation).
Such an individual will assess the importance, urgency and risk associated with each situation and takes actions which are timely and in the best interests of the organisation demonstrating and communicating a high level of ownership and commitment to achieving results.
To achieve this, employees need to know they are important and trusted. This goes for the most senior executives to the most junior staff. Everyone in the organization needs to know their own role; they need to understand how to achieve their short and long term objectives in order to successfully deliver their agreed goals and specific objectives for the enterprise. If distrust seeps down from the very top, it negatively infects employees’ actions.
Encouraging a culture of trust is a key priority, creating a place where people want to take ownership, accountability and responsibility for challenges and problems. Individuals will then want to uncover and openly discuss recommendations and solutions because they are aware of their personal, departmental and organisational objectives and are aware of their freedom to act given set-boundaries.