With employees and managers under pressure to demonstrate productivity, establishing lines of accountability is crucial. But how can organisations find the sweet spot, asks Mike Thackray?
Establishing clear lines of accountability is seen as essential for enhancing organisational performance and achieving goals, particularly as departments are under pressure to deliver more with less.
Ensuring that everyone knows what they are accountable for, communicating it to the business, and adding a few incentives into the mix, and we have the recipe for success, don’t we?
Possibly. We also have the recipe for something entirely different – a mix of secrecy, defensiveness and blame. To highlight the challenge, we need to understand the human instincts that kick in once we have been given something to own.
Owning our outcomes
Once accountabilities have been clarified, they become ours to own. We strive to achieve them, give them our utmost attention and go the extra mile to deliver them.
Accountability
But the wisdom of establishing absolute clarity on everyone’s accountabilities rests on the extent to which you believe organisational outcomes can be neatly divided up and used to drive the right behaviours to support the whole. In my experience, this is not an easy task.
A story that illustrates this problem perfectly comes from my days working in entertainment retail as an area manager.
I had accountability for sales in my stores, and worked alongside a loss prevention manager whose main responsibility was to prevent loss and store theft.
You don’t have to be a crack psychologist to predict how I reacted. I pushed for fewer security measures in the name of displaying our stock openly and freeing up time to spend serving customers.
I did so safe in the knowledge that if we sold a bunch of stuff but lost a lot more in the process, I could invoke the law of ‘not my circus, not my monkeys’ and point the finger at my colleague and say ‘Well, he’s accountable for that’.
The logical behaviour for anyone whose key accountability is to reduce store theft might be to minimise stock on display or literally shut the shop.
In reality, we tempered these behaviours reasonably well, but did so because of intrinsic values, goodwill and an implicit understanding of the actual goal.
In this instance, neatly dividing up the real goal into smaller accountabilities had its limitations and the organisation would have been better off blurring those lines or ensuring that an overarching goal superseded our own smaller ones.
High accountability cultures
The story highlights a real challenge for HR in a high-accountability culture. Namely that, in specifying what you are accountable for, we inadvertently indicate where your accountabilities are not.
No one’s accountabilities stand completely apart from those owned by colleagues, but all are inextricably linked and require collaboration to get the job done. In effect, we sometimes own too little.
Another side-effect of clear accountability is the role that fear plays in the workplace.
Fear that if we fail to meet our narrow set of accountabilities we may not get promoted, we’ll be judged, sidelined for the younger colleague untainted by years of experience or not live up to parental or spousal expectations.
At its most basic level, we may simply fear being out of a job. It’s clearly not an unreasonable fear, but how can we hope to get the most out of our employees if their energies are first and foremost directed at protecting simply what is theirs?
Fear that alerts us to genuine danger is adaptive and useful, but fear that prevents us from raising issues, taking healthy risks, sharing information, admitting knowledge gaps or working for interests other than our own is not.
One of the side-effects of an over-focus on accountability is that this fear is exacerbated.
Finding the balance
All this does not necessarily mean removing all accountabilities, but it does require a change in how accountabilities are structured, discharged and assessed.
No one’s accountabilities stand completely apart from those owned by colleagues, but all are inextricably linked and require collaboration to get the job done.”
It should also include an honest assessment of the likely behaviours that will ensue if we clearly specify and reward what someone is accountable for.
There are a few ways in which HR can improve this situation:
Make the ultimate outcome the most rewarding: Using my retail example, if store profit had held the biggest reward for both me and my colleague, the point illustrated above would have been moot.
Without taking too much of a Skinnerian stance (using rewards or punishments to influence behaviours) if you want to understand why people do things, first look at what they are rewarded for.
Build in ambiguity: Joint accountabilities, matrix working and fuzzy lines get a bad press. But these also come with benefits, namely that it forces people to cooperate to achieve important outcomes.
The benefits are often hard won however and teams that are used to clearly defined accountabilities or even silo-working will benefit greatly from help and development in order to leverage the benefits of this ambiguity. You may not be able to pinpoint the exact source of an issue, but the ability to do so was always an illusion anyway.
Avoid the scapegoat trap: By all means investigate what went wrong but let go of the idea that all issues can and should be traced back to a single accountable individual.
Organisational errors are rarely down to the personality flaws or behaviour of a single individual and we should first look to the way the system influences and drives behaviour.
Accountability falls into the same category as so many topics when it comes to behaviour at the individual, team and organisational level – namely that it sits on a bell-curve of utility.
Be careful that in the drive to provide clarity and specify what people are accountable for, you don’t amplify negative behaviours that really limit organisational performance.
Sign up to our weekly round-up of HR news and guidance
Receive the Personnel Today Direct e-newsletter every Wednesday
HR business partner opportunities on Personnel Today
Browse more HR business partner jobs