Creating a Culture of Accountability

How do I create greater accountability?? I think the first response to that question is… are you sure you want to???

“We need greater accountability” is often an ad hominem rallying cry whenever something is going wrong.? But what does it actually mean?? I think in some cases, what it means is that something bad happened and everyone would like a clearer picture of who is at fault.? Without clear accountability, blame attribution is hard.? Sometimes what it means is we need a greater adherence to integrity of commitment because trust has broken down.? Trust is hard in a world where there’s no commitment or no follow-through on past commitments.? I think sometimes what it means is that we need to be able to operate more streams in parallel and have clearer ownership of who owns those streams.? Without clarity of ownership and accountability, operating in parallel is tough.

Usually? the “we need greater accountability” has resonance all the way up and down the leadership chain.? Ground-level employees want more accountability from middle-management and leadership.? Leadership wants more accountability for middle-management and ground-level employees.? Middle-management wants more accountability from their leadership and their ground-level employees.? Everyone agrees that someone else is at fault and should be accountable!

Too often, the transition from best-effort to accountability is seen as a transition from “we’re all in this together” to “you're on your own”.??

The opposite of an accountability-oriented culture is a best-effort culture.? Best-effort cultures are great.? Everyone is working together in harmony.? They take risks, they fail together, they succeed together.? They set goals based on aspiration and ambition without as much regard for achievability and then do the best they can.? All for one and one for all.? In practice, a lot of small teams operate efficiently as a best-effort until striving hard to achieve various goals, succeeding and failing along the way.?

The challenge is that, at some point in an organization's growth, best effort starts to not scale.? Different teams have different objectives that aren’t aligned.? Team A needs to depend on team B.? Leadership can’t provide consistent guidance over everything. Startups often go through a difficult transition where they need to pivot from an all-for-one best-effort culture to a more hierarchical, accountability-oriented culture.??

At first, this seems easy.? We all agree best-effort isn’t working.? Everyone is clamoring for more accountability.? Simple, we just need to set firmer expectations and hold people to them!? Along comes the planning cycle, the OKRs, the goals reviews.? Now we have a framework for accountability.??

start by focusing on creating a culture of support... When individuals feel they have and can get the support they need, then accountability isn’t a thing you have to create.?

But then sometimes it doesn’t work.? Everyone is missing their goals, teams can’t depend on each other, trust is breaking down.? The default assumption is that accountability is failing because the system didn’t put enough bounds on the person to ensure they didn’t fail and isn’t punitive enough when they did fail.? The temptation is to micro-manage even further.??

In a best-effort culture, leaders roll up their sleeves and help together.? In an accountability culture, the expectation is that you own it now and leadership’s role is to call balls and strikes.? Three strikes, you’re out!? Or maybe, “one strike and I take over.”?

In my experience though, in that transition from leader-as-participant to leader-as-umpire, something important sometimes gets lost – support.? Support in the form of a two-way dialog about what is possible, what the risks are, and what tangible help might allow you to accomplish more with less risk.? Support can also mean coaching and guidance along the way.??

Without support, when a project goes sideways, the lead for that project might reasonably say “hey, I got thrown in the deep end here with an unrealistic objective… I asked for help, but help wasn’t available.”? In a best-effort culture, that’s fine.? The objective was unrealistic, no help was available, and the project failed.? In an accountability-oriented culture though, someone should be at fault.? Is the project lead at fault?? Did they push back on the unrealistic objective and get overruled?? Did they make a reasonable ask for the things they needed to succeed and were denied?? If yes to either of those, who is accountable now???

Support can also mean coaching and guidance along the way.??

The transition from best-effort to accountability is a transition to say: I’m giving you more authority, more authority to decide what you can commit to, more authority to ask for help, more authority to direct the resources at your discretion… in exchange for you taking more ownership of the outcomes.

My recommendation, when working to create a culture of accountability, is to start by focusing on creating a culture of support.? Focus on the structure of the dialog around asking for help and the mechanisms for raising and triaging risks.? When individuals feel they have and can get the support they need, then accountability isn’t a thing you have to create.? Individuals will be happy to take on commitments and be accountable to them.