Accountability & Decision Making

I had a very interesting question posed to me last week. How do you reduce bureaucracy?

To address it, I needed to understand what they meant by “bureaucracy”. After all, words are merely analogies for thoughts and, if we think differently, sometimes language can be confusing.

Some see bureaucracy as a version of “red tape” or regulations that reduce freedom of movement; others see it as a waste of time. In the case of the person I spoke to, it was about organizations' inability to make decisions. Everyone has to be involved in the decision process, and it takes inordinate time and energy to move forward.

Interestingly, however, in all three cases, I put it down to a lack of accountability. Last week , I talked about accountability as holding people accountable for the choices they make. But embedded deeply in accountability is the notion that when exercising accountability, there is a key component of decision-making.

If you are to be held accountable for a choice you make, you need the freedom to make that decision. This is the key to accountability.

In our work to define accountability in our clients, the essence boils down to decision-making. The corollary to accountability is, therefore, enabling decision-making at the lowest appropriate levels of the organization. It is about freeing up people to make decisions and ensuring they both have the authority to decide, as well as the clarity that they are expected to make decisions as part of their job.

I often tell people that policies are designed to curb people's sense of responsibility. In other words, in organizations with no accountability, we use policies to curb people's innate sense of what to do. So, red tape thrives in the absence of accountability.

But why, then, does everyone need to be involved in decisions?

There are three reasons:

???We are unsure who should make the decision, so we bring as many people together as possible in the hope of figuring it out

???Anaklesis is rife in the organization, so we don't want to leave people out for fear of alienating them

???We don't know how to make decisions, so fear creeps in that we might make the wrong decision. This is a matter of risk assessment and unexplored risk becomes fear.

The last bullet is very real. Strangely, very few of us have been given a framework to make decisions.

If I lack a framework, I may lose confidence in my decision, and if I cannot show you how I made my decision through a framework, you, too, will lose confidence in my decision-making.

Clarity of accountability enables us to be clear who has the authority to make the decision. That clarity reduces our anaklesis and ensures everyone knows who makes the decision. It also defines who needs to be brought into the decision process and ensures they know that.

So, what about the third bullet? As part of our accountability work, we teach people how to make decisions—we give them a cognitive framework.?

In the end, clarity of accountability brings about:

???Alignment

???Speed of decisions

???Reduction of red tape

???Increased productivity

???Confidence, and

???Ultimately engagement

Who wouldn't want that for their organizations?

So, if you find yourself in too many meetings, missing deadlines, and lacking empowerment, consider clarifying accountability to reduce your bureaucracy.