Accountability: Connecting to Purpose

In our last newsletter we talked about allowing employees to choose to be accountable and how—even if leaders don’t allow that choice—employees are making this choice anyway. And in a “command and control” environment, many choose not to be accountable, despite saying the opposite.

Why do employees do this, and what guarantee do we have that anyone will actually choose to be accountable?

The Need to Disobey

Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung suggested that disobedience is the first step to consciousness. In other words, our recognition that we are free to disobey is also our realisation that we are a free agent.

By the time we arrive in the workplace, not only is consciousness of our freedom deeply ingrained, but so is our awareness that our freedom is often manifested through disobedience. And disobedience in the workplace is rarely expressed directly, but often manifested as a lack of ‘engagement’, a low level of commitment, minimal cooperation and less than optimal performance.

Even organisations that would vehemently deny that they operate by command and control still talk about the need for everyone to accept a set of “organisational values” and articulate multi-point and glossily communicated “visions” that employees need to “buy in to”.

All of this practically demands disobedience!

Why Choose Accountability?

But why would an employee choose to be accountable to organisational goals, values, and even vision, knowing that by choosing freely they commit themselves to their work, their performance, their collaboration and cooperation?

If their work provides them with meaning and purpose, then they are far more likely to do so.?

But how can we find meaning and purpose in the most mundane of jobs?

Author James Hollis says that “all closed systems are engines of boredom, stultification, and spiritual death.” And most workplaces are closed systems. This means that the work itself is cut off from influences and connections from outside the individual worker, and even the team in which they work.

Dealing with outside influences tends to be the role of the leader or other parts of the organisation, who set performance goals and objectives for the worker or the team. So meaning and purpose need to be found in the work itself - which often, as Hollis suggests, makes us bored, unenthusiastic and even foolish.

But if we work in an open system, one that is clearly connected to the outside world—the customers, suppliers, users and those impacted by what our organisation does—there is a far greater chance that we can gain meaning and purpose in our work.

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