Sharing information & responsibility

Read a fantastic article by John M. Darley - How Organizations Socialize Individuals into Evildoing. Definitely a must read. I'm not going to discuss the article per se, it just posed an interesting idea:

Do organisations fall off the wagon because of a lack of shared information and responsibility? Falling off the wagon doesn't even have to mean corporate criminal status, it can simply be where organisational performance suffers.

So I thought I'd take the time to look discuss this question:

How do you encourage information flow and shared responsibility within your organisation?

We've all heard the phrase - "That's not my problem". 

In fact, I have to say I've used it myself personally. As much as possible however I've always quickly followed it up with, "but I'm happy to help". And yet I've often felt the need to let someone know just to let them know it's not my responsibility but that I care enough to get involved. I still say it sometimes and catch myself and remind myself it should never be said!

Unfortunately many don't care, and to them it definitely isn't their problem.

So let's look at the two areas that allow people 'not to care'.

Information.

'Fail quickly' right? That's what we're supposed to do as founders, startups, new organisations, new divisions, new initiatives - fail quickly.

How can you do that without the right information? People excuse themselves of responsibility when there isn't enough information to prove otherwise. In larger organisations, information hoarding is a significant problem, people build fiefdom's in order to seemingly protect their job, when really it couldn't be further from the truth.

If you're not sharing information around your organisation then you can't fail quickly because you'll have no metrics by which to judge the failure, and you certainly won't have data to learn from.

People don't like reporting bad news for fear of negative consequences. A culture where reporting bad news is frowned upon or discouraged creates a problem that when something eventually does surface, the delay has made if 10x worse than if it had of been reported straight away at the time.

You must build a culture of trust and transparency in your organisation. People need to feel comfortable enough to ask questions outside their area of competency (because often they're not stupid questions at all!), and raise the issues early to avoid more damage later on.

Responsibility.

Today's organisations are often describes as flat, pyramid, horizontal, vertical - don't know if you've noticed but these don't really describe the dynamic of your organisation? They are often just Microsoft Visio generated charts on the wall that back up our early individual's earlier statement in this article: "That's not my problem (NMP)".

You know what the fundamental issue with the NMP attitude is with regards to responsibility? 

If someone doesn't take responsibility for decisions and consequences, they become large enough to destroy an organisation and then it's  everyone's problem.

When you're a smaller organisation, a startup, everything is everyones' problem. The skill supposedly in creating a larger organisation is that you can diversify the tasks and the management of the organisation to allow for specialisation and as a result better overall outcomes (the sum of the parts argument).

Unfortunately what it actually normally creates is a culture where the NMP excuse is easier, because responsibility becomes so fragmented that no one person can be counted upon to take up 100% of the challenge in any area.

This is where your senior team members, your co-founders, your cadre must earn their money. Pay them as Daniel Pink says 'enough money to take this conversation off the table as a motivating factor', then ask everything of them. Senior team members don't even have to be 'higher up the chain' they can be your foot soldiers who have been with your business right from the start. Without a doubt though they must be the loyally rewarded and respected band of people for whom it's always their problem. 

Share information.  Own responsibility.