A Culture of Accountability@Scale | Lessons from Amazon—a Series on Building Culture at Scale

This series explores scaling culture by looking at the impact on Behaviors, Processes, and Practices that support successful outcomes in Decision-making, Accountability, and Innovation.

You can read about Decision-making@Scale in an earlier article in the series.

Now, let’s focus on successful cultural practices that create a culture of accountability. Accountability ranks as the 8th most popular company value. Without it, strategic plans often fail. Team-based accountability fosters support and success. Creating an accountability value statement provides a framework for employees to collaborate and achieve success. For more on this, see “Why Accountability as a Core Value is Important for CEOs.”

Many of the behaviors and practices discussed here are shared across other companies and might add value to your organization.

Behaviors

Amazon's six key leadership principles that emphasize accountability work synergistically with other principles. For instance, finding a balance between Frugality, Insisting on the Highest Standards, and Delivering Results is crucial for achieving the company’s goals.

Amazonians are clear about expectations and contribute to immediate and long-term success, especially with principles like Hire and Develop the Best.

Principles Work in Synergy

A former colleague illustrated these principles in action when deciding between internal and external resources for a leadership program. She prioritized Insisting on the Highest Standards for quality, then applied Frugality through a lens of long-term thinking, resulting in a decision to use 60% internal and 40% external resource for an efficient and cost-effective outcome that minimized risks.

Avoiding Passive-Aggressive Cultures

One standout principle is Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit. It encourages employees to voice their concerns and disagreements with a decision, using data backed arguments where possible. Once a decision is made, everyone is expected to commit to it fully, with the understanding that decisions can be revisited if proven wrong later.

When a senior team changed a key metric and process the front-line managers believed this would have negative consequences and voiced their concerns. Despite their vigorous arguments, the decision was implemented. The managers committed fully to the new process and, after six months, data showed the previous metric was more effective. This experience reinforced the importance of balancing speed and quality and willingness to change decisions based on outcomes.

Processes

Jeff Bezos famously said:

“good intentions never work, you need good mechanisms to make anything happen."

You need to replace human best efforts with repeatable, scalable processes and tools, which are often automated, to achieve the desired outcome. A mechanism is a “virtuous cycle” that reinforces and improves itself as it operates. It takes controllable inputs and transforms them into ongoing outputs to address a recurring business challenge. Mechanisms are best suited for solving recurring problems or opportunities, as opposed to one-off challenges.

Bar Raisers

Amazon’s Bar Raiser program ensures high hiring standards. Bar Raisers are trained to lead interview panels and can veto hiring decisions, ensuring that every candidate meets Amazon's high standards. This program helps Amazon Hire and Develop the Best by using behavioral research to guide hiring managers.

Emails to Jeff

Any employee or customer could email Jeff Bezos directly, serving as a safety valve to address high-risk complaints. Managed by an executive customer relations team, these emails sometimes led to direct actions by executives. This practice showed a commitment to the leadership principles of Learning and Being Curious and Being Right a Lot.

Connections Daily Questions

The daily question tool allows every Amazon employee to provide feedback on their work experience. This real-time data holds managers accountable for the employee experience. Technology makes it easy to survey employees, and addressing feedback promptly prevents survey fatigue.

Collaboration technology makes getting employee feedback a completely scalable tool to hold everyone more accountable for the employee experience and performance. Regardless of your view on its precision or reliability, it is an important indicator to have available as a company scales.

Practices

Single Threaded Leaders

Single-threaded leadership is considered by some to be the most critical organizational design concept at Amazon, allowing the giant organization to avoid coupling and slow velocity while increasing the number of initiatives that Amazon can run in parallel.

Single-threaded leadership is assigned for each initiative or business problem, insuring the leader’s focus on that initiative and that initiative alone. That person leads one or more separable, single-threaded teams to deliver the initiative goals. The name comes from computer science terminology—a single-threaded program executes one command at a time.

More companies are exploring ways to adopt single threaded leadership.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUN87EvWmgw&t=2s

Performance Metrics

Apple’s collaborative culture and performance system rewards collective behavior. Leaders at Apple are accountable for outcomes requiring contributions from multiple teams, fostering a culture of shared purpose.

Google’s data-driven approach to manager accountability, exemplified by Project Oxygen, demonstrates that exceptional managers significantly impact performance. Google uses this data to improve underperforming managers through targeted training or role reassignment.

Amazon uses Connections data to determine when managers were struggling and when the data was rolled up to a single threaded leader it identified ecosystems in need of attention.

Conclusion

Employees are looking for clarity and accountability mechanisms give you that. One of Gallup’s 12 Drivers of Engagement is “I know what is expected of me at work.” Integrating behavioral expectations with processes like the Bar Raiser program and practices like xx effectively scales a culture of accountability. Transparency and clear accountability mechanisms enhance the employee experience and positively impact outcomes like Execution.

Cultures of accountability, like those at Alphabet, Facebook, and Amazon, deliver strong execution according to The Culture 500.

Fast-paced, high-quality decision-making combined with accountable employees and leadership is essential. However, without a culture of innovation at scale, companies risk becoming outdated. The next article in the series discusses Innovation@Scale.

Share how your company fosters a culture of innovation.

ChatGPT was used to revise this article

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