Fix accountabilities (if nothing else)

Accountability can not be shared, responsibility can. This simple rule will force you to rethink entire working practices.

There is a cancer in many organisations called ‘lack of clarity’ and which results in confusion about who is accountable for what or in charge of what. A naïve democratisation of the firm has made it politically correct to profess that everybody is ‘responsible’ for everything, that we all have ‘collective responsibility’ for things in the firm. We have mistaken this for participation, collaboration and collective intelligence. This is just one of the many things we do to make life in organisations more complicated than it should be.

I have used this rule for many years: you cannot share accountabilities, you can only share responsibilities. I thank the English language for this rule. In English, we have these two words: ‘accountability’ and ‘responsibility’. Accountability has its roots and meaning associated with counting, take into account, called to account, account for, etc. ‘Responsibility’ has different roots and associated meanings: to respond, be responsive, responsible, etc.

More than one person may respond or be responsive to a problem, but only one will be called to account for the solution. There is no law that decides this! I am just taking advantage of the words’ different roots in English, something I can’t do in many other languages, where accountability and responsibility are the same word.

This simple rule will make you rethink entire business processes and working practices. Single point accountability is one of the most powerful rules that can be applied to processes in the organisation. Again, this is not intended to damage collective responsiveness, internal collaboration, cooperation or the desire to be more or less inclusive and gather as much intellectual capital as you can. All these are perfectly compatible with ‘the buck stops here’.

These are some of the reasons why there is much confusion in organisations:

• Lack of clarity. Either people simply don’t know who is accountable for what, or, very often, different people believe that they are accountable for the same thing.
• We have hammered home the idea of ‘collective responsibility’ and have sacrificed clarity about accountability along the way. Collegiality is great, but only if everybody can be fired at once when a disaster occurs; otherwise it is simply an alibi for incompetence.
• In organisations, you often hear, “We’re all in the same boat“, but I don’t know of any ship with twenty captains.
• We rely on the existence of job/role descriptions to have an explicit reference, but they still don’t guarantee that duplication of accountabilities and responsibilities will be avoided.
• There are lots of non-accountable people whose actions (seem to) have no immediate consequence. This is a viral behaviour responsible for cultures where it’s ok not to deliver or not to see things through.

If people in your organisation have a problem with the compatibility between ‘single point accountability’ (the buck stops here) and ‘collective responsibility’ (we are all in the same boat), then you have a deeper philosophical problem concerning clarity and transparency. The split between accountability and responsibility can bring that clarity in, can foster trust (you can trust people who don’t hide behind anonymous collectivism) and can de facto create a sense of order and discipline that is usually welcomed by the majority of people.

What are the areas to fix? In a nutshell, people may be accountable for five different things:

• Decisions: this is one of the crucial ingredients of organisational life. Who makes the decision and who doesn’t should be very clear.
• Outcomes: one can be accountable for a result regardless of the journey or the intervention of others needed to get there.
• Use of resources: allocating people and money.
• Positions: people should be accountable for their own judgement and position on things that matter to the organisation (strategy, implementation…) and be able to stand up for them, instead of having to use the ‘they’-alibi (‘they’, ‘the company’, ‘the system’).
• In addition, people may decide to take accountability for things, particularly those that fall in no-man’s land.

If you look around your organisation, you must be able to map these areas of accountability and responsibility in a way that is clear (everybody can understand it) and transparent (everybody is informed).

The reason why the title of this fourth process contains the addition ‘if nothing else’ is simply to stress the importance of this idea and its powerful ability to travel virally across the organisation. When people see accountability being practiced, more people will be tempted to jump in and will do the same, creating ‘a culture of accountability’.

There will be many times in organisational life when not everything can be mapped, planned and predicted; when management decisions reach a good enough threshold and when, beyond that point, the implementation plan will look far from perfect. This is far more desirable than the alternative of shooting for 100% perfection and not going anywhere while you wait. In these circumstances, if you fix accountabilities and then trust the people who hold them, you’ve done a great job. Accountable people will then have to figure out themselves how to deal with all the gaps and ambiguities.

Accountability (to account) is not shared → Single point. Responsibility (to respond) can be shared.

Ban the word ‘they’ (as in ‘they’ don’t support it, ‘they’ asked us, ‘they’ said).

Ask “Who are ‘they’?” In 90% of the cases there is no ‘they’, but something invisible called ‘the system’ or ‘the culture’ or ‘management’. It is a perfect device for hiding incompetence.

Ban ‘it isn’t my fault’ (or my department’s or my team’s).

Reorganise, plan, transform on the basis of ‘good enough’.

50% half-defined + 100% fixed accountabilities = superb implementation.

100% superbly defined + 50% fixed accountabilities = disaster in the air.

Copyright © - Leandro Herrero - 2008