Accountability, responsibility and why we get so frustrated at work

Recently, I have been revisiting the terms "accountability" and "responsibility" from the perspective of psycholinguistics. As a linguist by education, who has worked outside of that domain all my life, I will probably always have an ear for this topic. It's really amazing to see how, if there is a lack of a word for a certain feeling or situation in people's native language, they often cannot sense, feel, understand, or address it. We don't just use our language to communicate with others. Noam Chomsky has identified a link between the language we speak, and the way we process and learn things, and adapt to our environment. This TED talk shows some amazing examples to prove how our language shapes the way we think.

I have been giving workshops on leadership and management again lately. Part of my workshops are conducted in Serbian, where I have noticed a lack of distinctive words for "accountability" and "responsibility." Both are expressed through by the same word (for the language nerds out there: "odgovornost"). I've also seen throughout my 20-year career that people often mix these terms, not being able to recognize where accountability stops and responsibility begins, and vice versa. To be honest, I couldn't explain it in a clear way myself either. But educating others, whether in a formal, non-formal, or informal way, pushes you to answer these questions for yourself to be able to explain it to others. I have found an explanation that I will share here. It comes from the Management 3.0 facilitation kit on Empowerment and Delegation.

It turns out, this needs to be explained also to people who do have distinct words for it. So, this proves I am not the only one struggling with this terminology and what these words actually mean. If that is true, how does that affect us in the workplace and the systems in which we work?

Let's look at this from two different scenarios that really happened.

A project manager is working directly with developers in an outsourcing IT company. His work is to satisfy the clients and manage the team, as his manager puts it. This is what he is accountable for.

However, the project manager intrinsically feels differently. In his view, it's the other way around: his job is to manage the client and satisfy the team. From his previous work experience, clients are always happy if the team is happy, whereas it's not always the case that when the client is happy with the result, the team is happy too. So why not do the smarter thing and go with what actually works, right? However, the manager did not get authority from his manager to make the team happy. He is not being held accountable for it, so why would he worry? He won't get in trouble if something goes wrong with the team (and something always goes wrong with the team if there is no intentionality in keeping them happy). He hears some of the team members being unhappy about the management not letting them work from home (this story is from 10 years ago when only a few US-based companies were working remotely) and he knows that if he used his good negotiation skills and an agile mindset, he would be able to convince the management to at least try and that would make the team happy.

After some weeks of gentle and persistent pressure, he manages to open the management to make an experiment with one day of work from home, with a set of technical and organizational constraints that are agreed upon with the people who want to try working from home.

It goes well.

They take the next step, two days, and it goes well. Long story short, people were given trust and they were held accountable for the results of the experiments. The team itself decided they don't feel comfortable with a fully remote workplace; they opted for what now, in 2024, turns out to be the typical 3+2 hybrid model. Everyone's happy. The managers are happy because they see the engagement of developers in typically managerial questions. The team feels seen and heard, so they really want to show accountability and they really do. The project manager went a step further, stepped out of their role as a typical project manager, negotiated a benefit for the team. Why? Because they felt responsible to do something they knew they had the skills for and others didn't. They felt responsible to at least try, even though they weren't held accountable for that by their own managers.

Some years later, the PM was working in a different company, with a really well-intentioned group of managers with a lot of domain knowledge, in an environment that "just wants to help developers do their jobs without interruptions." This meant that the service part of the company was organized by functionality, while the value stream was organized by project. This resulted in a siloed organization, where the flow of information doesn't effectively address the need for real-time information and the decision-making does not follow the designed processes, since they were made for the happy flow and not real-life situations when steps in the process are forgotten because pressure is up and time is tight. Well-intentioned, unorganized, created a chaotic system in which the support staff is nothing but insecure about their role, duties, and priorities. In such a system, many responsible individuals try to help manage a system that is not designed for change, for unforeseen scenarios. But they are operating in a system based on accountability; the responsibility they feel intrinsically gets not only overseen but often times dismissed with a good intention, but a bad message: "Don't worry about it, it's not your job to think about it, we're here to help so focus on your job only and nothing else, so be thankful for that and please go back to doing what you're hired for."

What happens next?

What happens is that a huge gap opens between the authority that is handed down by someone holding you accountable and the authority that you need in order to satisfy your own sense of personal responsibility. That gap is the main source of the frustration all of us felt at some point in our careers. And that is the gap that managers, especially high-ranked ones, forgot, because it has been a while since their ideas were not accepted by default.

In closing, the distinction between accountability and responsibility is more than semantic; it shapes our workplace dynamics and individual effectiveness. Effective leadership requires clear communication of these roles to foster an environment of empowerment and trust. By encouraging a culture where team members feel deeply responsible and valued, we can enhance organizational effectiveness and resilience. Let's strive to create a balance where both accountability and responsibility are embraced, paving the way for a more dynamic and successful future.