Accountability Isn’t Attitude It Is Action
Very Deliberate Things Your Business Can Do To Build It
To begin this article, let’s define accountability:
Accountability is being expected to prove, in a measurable way, that your decisions are right in order to gain reward or avoid punishment.
If you want to know how we came to this definition, read this article. It is a solid starting point for this article and a definition I hope your business can embrace. Accountability is far more than a state of mind. If you are only interested in creating a temporary mindset, then stick to using the phrase responsibility and recognize that mindset won’t last very long.
Define
Just like the first step in this article was to define accountability. The first step for your organization needs to be defining exactly who is accountable for exactly what. Exactly! If you can’t easily describe it, people won’t easily be held accountable.
Often you hear of cultures of accountability, but culture often implies implicit rather than explicit definition. Don’t imply. Clearly define and then post it on the wall. Have a culture of responsibility but make accountability the law. And don’t worry about that sounding oppressive, quite the contrary, it is a very liberating theme.
People like clarity. They like requirements defined. They want to know where they stand and what they will be judged on. Things that are defined are manageable, things that aren’t well defined will become overwhelming or worse yet be entirely ignored. Leave grand vision and endless possibility to concepts like growth and possibility, not accountability.
Build Feedback Systems
Accountability requires feedback and feedback that goes in both directions. Make people accountable for collecting it, understanding it, providing it, and encouraging it. Done properly, feedback drives accountability. It is the information flow, the communication process that allows you understand and respond to your changing business.
Once you’ve defined the who and the what, you need to establish how these feedback systems will be created. This includes things like product instrumentation, comments, surveys, and anything that provides for the flow of information from and to your customers. Don’t leave anything out. It is impossible to over collect feedback. You will need to develop discipline and focus around what you do with it, but collect it all.
Measure
Have a data rich company with well developed feedback systems and complete instrumentation is difficult. Businesses simply fail to prioritize the development needed, instead they grasp endlessly for growth. But on many occasions where this has been achieved (or at least something relatively close), organizations often fail to prioritize measurement.
Sure they develop a few KPI, but that tends to lead to questions. Questions drive analysis and poorly educated or poorly disciplined analytic teams fail to prioritize measurement. If you don’t prioritize measurement, you fail to prioritize accountability. If you want your organization to be accountable, you need to invest in measurement — dashboards, reports, quantification.
Create Consequence
Accountability requires consequence. You must create meaningful rewards and punishments. This is not an easy task nor is it one that is easily defined in a generalized article like this. For starters, your consequences should be defined. They should have clear feedback systems and also be measured. You need to know whether they are properly encouraging the behavior and performance you are seeking.
Consequence completes your feedback system. So there are some guidelines that generally apply to all businesses. Time consequence to be as close to your business drivers as possible. If a business unit misses a timeline, a salesman makes his target, or the infrastructure team completes the re-platforming — some level of reward or punishment should follow quickly. If your companies lone incentive is an annual bonus, no one is really accountable.
Consequences should be set against service levels, goals, short-term hurdles, and long term performance. The more behavior you reward, the more you will get of it. Punishments need to be a little more thoughtful, otherwise the consequence may result in employee attrition. And everything should be revisited thoroughly and frequently. Many a company has mistakenly continued to reward behaviors that analysis had already proved detrimental to their success.
Act To Create Accountability
- Define who will be accountable for what in a clear and easy to explain fashion.
- Create the feedback systems to collect and transmit information about your products, processes, and people.
- Measure the results, thoroughly. Be clear and be transparent.
- Assure that there are frequent, timely, and relevant consequence for both success and failure.
One final note — remember it is failure of action, effort, and process that you want to discourage. Do not punish people for ideas that don’t work out. Ideas, tests, and other controlled failures are good for a company and should be encouraged.
For additional reading on the history of accountability consider:
