Accountability, Productivity And Saving Lives

I heard a sad radio interview this week. A mother recounted the failures of her local police and related public services to prevent a young man from murdering her daughter. An inquiry found that the police had not followed their own procedures and no one had joined up the dots among the other services. In this depressing and not unfamiliar story, a failure of accountability is likely to have been a contributory factor.

In complex, multi-stakeholder environments like the one above, accountabilities exist across boundaries, within and between organisations, and at a personal level. Clarity of roles and rigorous, open and honest communication are critical. Good and bad systems and procedures are created by people. That's why creating a culture where words and actions are congruent is so important. And you've got to care.

Aligning the culture

The culture of an organisation is not static. It gets shaped day in and day out by every decision, every action and employees' reaction to them. People who do care can still become blind to weaknesses and threats when their heads look down too much and they don’t look up to see what is happening. Understandably, their focus can become the relentless day-to-day pressures heaped upon them. NHS Trusts all over the country are struggling to match resources to demand. Recent figures contrast a less than 1% annual funding growth with a 4% annual rise in demand over the last five years of austerity. It doesn’t take a genius to work out why there is a crisis.

You can be accountable for the resources you have, but not the ones you don’t have. Stoicism has its place - so does getting the right support and healthy contention.

Leaders set the tone, the expectations and the direction. They drive the ethos through the whole organisation with more than words, starting with themselves. We’ve heard this mantra several times – 'it was just a couple of rogue software developers/traders/journalists'. Michael Schrage draws the deadly link in a recent Harvard Business Review article about Volkswagen’s woes:

 Always look to the leadership. Where were Volkswagen’s code reviews? Who took pride and ownership in the code that makes Volkswagen and Audi cars run?

Managers make happen what is supposed to happen (with oversight). They ensure the agreed standards are maintained. They spot and intervene when they see the symptoms, to nip things in the bud before poor performance becomes endemic. Take any recent debacle like FIFA, Volkswagen or the banks and massive disconnect was obvious between senior leadership, the espoused values and beliefs, and actual behaviour. Far from driving the right culture, leaders were asleep at the wheel or taking us down dark alleys. You reap what you sow.

It's personal

Accountability is first and foremost a personal responsibility - at all levels. In a healthy culture, front line employees are given authority to make decisions, are encouraged to identify problems, to fix them or to raise issues with their managers where they need help. In unhealthy cultures, it’s a case of ‘that’s not my job’, ‘I’ll leave it to someone else’, ‘no one will notice if I do/I don’t‘, and there are no personal consequences - except there are for colleagues, customers, patients, suppliers, parents, whistleblowers etc.

Being responsible and accountable for people's safety is a common issue with the police and Volkswagen examples above. Put yourself in the shoes of this trainee social worker in an anecdotal story told to me recently. The rules said that in particular circumstances you should double up with a colleague to visit a client with known behavioural problems. In practice, you are told to go on your own because there is no one else available. What do you do?

Your manager is flouting procedure and placing the burden on you. Who is managing the manager? You don’t want to let your client down, but you put yourself and your client at risk if you go on your own. How do you manage yourself, your manager and the client? Accountability means stepping up when the buck stops with you and doing the right thing because you care enough. What would you do?

Capability and commitment

There is a difference between being willing to hold people or yourself to account and the ability to do so. Diagnosing and addressing the combination of willing/unwilling and able/unable involves a series of performance conversations between manager and team members. It’s one of the challenges managers struggle with the most in my experience. How to hold a difficult conversation is never far away from the learning and development agenda.

Appointing managers who want to be managers and have genuine people skills goes some way to resolving these common issues. Ditto recruiting employees who ‘get it’.  Too often someone is promoted to management as a reward for technical ability. Too often a manager is not given time to manage and their time is taken up with their technical or functional contribution in salami slicing times. 

The UK has a productivity problem. Ethical leadership and effective people management and development can make a huge difference. Having the right resources and enough of them both matter. Healthy organisational cultures ensure disciplined and meaningful accountability at all levels that is welcomed, understood and put into practice. The starting points are personal commitment and integrity – genuinely holding yourself to account for what you do on a daily basis in line with the real purpose and values of your organisation. You get it, you care enough, you take responsibility, you make your voice heard, you do the right thing.

Otherwise, the consequences can literally be fatal.

(Header graphic via www.compuhigh.com)

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David (@David_Shindler) is an independent coach, blogger and speaker, associate with several consultancies, founder of The Employability Hub (free resources for students and graduates), author of Learning to Leap: a guide to being more employable, Digital Bad Hair Days and co-author with Mark Babbitt of 21 Century Internships. His commitment and energy is in promoting lifelong personal and professional development and in tackling youth unemployment. He works with young people and professionals in education and business.

To read more of his work - visit the Learning to Leap blog.

And check out his other published articles on LinkedIn:

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