Establishing accountability lines is essential when employees and managers are under pressure to show productivity. Mike Thackray asks: How can organisations find a sweet spot?
It is important to establish clear lines of responsibility in order to improve organisational performance and achieve goals, especially as departments are being pushed harder than ever before to do more with less.
We have a recipe for success if we make sure everyone understands their responsibilities, communicate it to the company, and add a few incentives.
Possibly. Also, we have a recipe for something completely different: a mixture of secrecy and defensiveness with blame. We need to know the human instincts which kick in when we are given something we can own to highlight the problem.
Ownership of our results
Once the accountabilities are clarified, we own them. We give them the utmost importance and strive to meet them.
The wisdom of setting up absolute clarity about everyone’s accountability depends on how you divide the organisational results and use them to motivate the right behaviors to support the entire. This is a difficult task.
My experience as a manager in the entertainment retail industry is a perfect example of this.
I was responsible for the sales of my stores and worked with a loss prevention supervisor whose primary responsibility was to stop loss and theft.
It’s not necessary to be an expert psychologist to know how I would react. I wanted to display our inventory openly, and have more time for customers.
I did this knowing that, if I lost money, but sold more, I would invoke the law ‘not my monkeys, not my circus’ and blame my colleague.
If the goal is to reduce theft in stores, it would be logical to minimize stock or to close down the store.
We were able to temper our behaviours due to intrinsic values, goodwill, and an understanding of the goal.
In this case, dividing the goal neatly into smaller accountability was not the best solution. The organisation would have done better to blur these lines or ensure that the overarching goal trumped our smaller ones.
Cultures of high accountability
This story highlights the real challenge that HR faces in an accountability-driven culture. In defining what you are responsible for, we accidentally indicate your lack of accountability.
All accountability is interconnected and requires collaboration. We sometimes have too few responsibilities.
Fear is another side effect of clear accountability.
We fear that we will not be promoted if we do not meet our strict set of accountability requirements. We may also fear being judged or demoted to make room for a younger colleague who is not tainted by experience.
We may fear losing our job at its most basic. This is a reasonable fear. But how can we expect our employees to give their best if they are focused on protecting what’s theirs first?
Fear can be adaptive, but it is not useful if it prevents you from taking risks, sharing knowledge, recognizing your ignorance, or working with others.
This fear can be exacerbated by a focus on accountability.
Finding the Balance
This does not mean that all accountability is removed, but it requires a change to the way in which accountabilities are structured and discharged, as well as assessed.
“No one’s accountability is separate from that of their colleagues. They are all inextricably connected and require collaboration.
This should include an honest evaluation of the likely behaviors that will result if we specify and reward clearly what someone is responsible for.
There are several ways that HR can improve the situation.
The ultimate result should be the most rewarding. Using the retail example above, if the store profit was the greatest reward for me and my co-worker, then the point made earlier would have been irrelevant.
If you want to know why people behave the way they do, look at their rewards.
Create ambiguity. Joint accountabilities and matrix working get bad press. These have their benefits as well, such as forcing people to work together to achieve important results.
However, the benefits can be hard-earned. Teams that are used with clearly defined accountability or even siloed working will benefit from help and training in order to maximize these benefits. It may be impossible to pinpoint the exact cause of an issue. But the illusion was never to know.
Avoid being a scapegoat: Investigate what went wrong, but don’t believe that you can or should blame a single person for all the problems.
Organisational mistakes are seldom the result of the character flaws or behavior of one individual. We should look at the way that the system influences the behaviour.
Accountability is similar to many other topics in terms of behaviour, whether at an individual, team or organisational level. It sits on the bell-curve.
In your desire to clarify and define what people are responsible for, be careful not to amplify the negative behaviors that limit organisational performance.
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