Why Accountability Matters

The benefits of accountability for your organisation go far beyond complying with regulations and meeting targets. Establishing a strong system of positive accountability improves your team’s culture, satisfaction, and overall performance—ultimately, it makes you a better leader.

Benefits for your team culture

By creating a culture of positive, high-level accountability in your team, you create an expectation that all individuals, no matter their place in the hierarchy, will be called to account for their performance and behaviours, and that they will play a role in calling others to account. They can also expect to receive regular feedback and recognition.

This doesn’t create a culture of fear—in fact, it is a lack of accountability that tends to foster finger-pointing and punishment. A low-accountability culture promotes the ‘silence, fear, blame, collusion, resistance, and deflection of responsibility’ which undermine the well-being and performance of your team and its members.6 A high-accountability culture, on the other hand, has clear objectives and expectations, and clear mechanisms through which people will be held to the organisation’s standards. There is a sense of order and regularity when ‘norms are (re)produced, internalised, and adjusted through accountability.’7

Accountability also creates identifiability—an awareness that each person’s actions and outputs will be attributed to them personally. This expectation acts as a deterrent to anti-social and deconstructive behaviours. It encourages individuals to act consistently with organisational standards and strive for positive output.8 A high-accountability culture is one of openness, clear expectations, ethical behaviour, collaboration, personal responsibility, feedback, and recognition. It makes for a satisfied and productive team, and great performance outcomes.

Benefits for your team members

In a high-accountability culture, individuals and teams are focused because they have clearly established goals and mechanisms by which their progress towards these goals will be assessed. Several features of accountability work together to bring out the best in your team members.

Clarity

Clear goals create focus and buy-in to the vision of your organisation. Clear descriptions of roles and responsibilities promote efficiency and enable individuals and teams to take ownership of their work, which motivates them to work hard.9 When your team members have a thorough understanding of what success looks like in their role and how this success will be measured, they have a standard by which to evaluate their own effectiveness. 10 This kind of clarity also helps them to adjust their priorities and understand how their work affects the team’s outcomes.

Communication

The process of clarifying goals, providing feedback, and solving problems creates open and engaging communication between managers and team members. This builds a high-trust relationship in which both parties can be transparent, acknowledge their mistakes, receive feedback without offence, and collaborate on improvement.11 Only when your team is characterised by trust and cooperation will its members respond to accountability from you and from each other.12

Strong relationships

For accountability to work, relationships within your team need to be characterised by trust and cooperation. As a leader, you create these in your one-on-one accountability relationships with your team members when you show interest in them and their needs, appreciate their efforts and successes, and work with them to remove barriers to performance (see chapter eight).13 Your team members feel safe to openly discuss their work when you exercise positive accountability and they feel supported when you ask what they need and provide it. A culture of accountability can also strengthen your team’s relationships with each other, which is supportive of both well-being and performance. When you create conditions in which your team members work together towards shared goals and hold each other accountable (see chapter three), you foster positive relationships.

Recognition

The frequent communication involved in accountability also gives ample opportunity for recognition. Recognising team members for their contributions and celebrate their successes is an important way to ensure that your accountability culture is positive. Studies show that 43% of people who are unsatisfied with their job attribute this to a lack of recognition and only three in ten U.S employees reported having received recognition in a seven-day period.14 Yet, regular recognition and praise increase individual productivity, engagement within teams, and commitment to the organisation.15 In fact, frequent feedback has been shown to improve employee well-being more than large but distant rewards.16

Development

Where there is accountability, there are also opportunities for learning and development. Such opportunities have been shown to positively impact profitability, employee retention, and customer satisfaction to a significant degree. However, in one study, only three in ten employees strongly agreed that someone at work encouraged their development.17 How you can do this through accountability relationships will be discussed in chapter eight.

Benefits for your performance and outputs

A high-functioning and high-morale team gets results. Through processes of evaluation and feedback, accountability leads to better performance and outputs, promotes innovation, and improves judgement and decision-making.

Better results

Striving for excellence becomes a core value and a cultural norm when individuals and teams are aware of their accountability to each other and their superiors, as well as to clients and stakeholders. There is a strong sense of ownership of one’s work and trust within teams which, when lacking, results in poor performance and chronic inefficiency.18 An accountability culture also establishes clear goals which provide focus and streamlines processes for better products and services.19

Innovation

The external and internal mechanisms for evaluation and feedback which exist in positive, high-accountability cultures promote creativity and innovation, which in turn result in better performance and outputs. External feedback makes individuals and teams aware of their shortcomings, and it can stimulate creativity for innovation to improve processes and products. This kind of stimulation can also be driven by internal evaluation as accountability provides an opportunity for self-reflection and learning.20

However, accountability mechanisms must not rely on blame or punishment. This creates fear, which encourages conformity and groupthink rather than creative problem-solving.21 Your employees also need to have a sense of autonomy for innovation to flourish. Rather than dictating what they do and how they do it, which is stifling, hold them accountable for their results while providing them freedom in how they achieve them.

Improved judgement and behaviour

Research demonstrates that an expectation of accountability encourages complex and systematic thinking to solve problems, which ultimately results in better judgement.22 The need to justify one’s decisions to others spurs deeper consideration during the decision-making process.23 However, this is only effective in certain environments characterised by trust in the person monitoring performance and a focus on processes over specific outcomes—the kind of environment this book will help you to create.24

Anticipating their performance being evaluated also keeps individuals and teams engaged and encourages discipline. It can influence them toward actions and behaviours which are expected of them.25 It is important to create a positive accountability culture, not a blame culture, so that evaluation is expected without being feared. Chapter three will demonstrate how to encourage this culture by framing evaluation as an opportunity for growth, not a precursor to punishment.

How accountable is your workplace?

Improving accountability offers significant benefits for all teams. Ask yourself some questions to consider how you are doing at creating this kind of workplace and what steps you could take to improve:

• Is the norm in your culture to blame, hide mistakes, and ignore problems?
• Does each member of your team have a clear understanding of the goals, values, and strategy of the organisation and team? Do they understand how these relate to their specific role and responsibilities?
• Are there established processes for regular evaluation, feedback, self-evaluation, and recognition of achievements?
• Is evaluation seen as an opportunity for growth and improvement in the future?

__________

The above comes from my eBook 'Accountability for Team Leaders'. You can receive a copy of the eBook by sending me a LinkedIn message requesting the eBook.

__________

References

1 A Sinclair, ‘The Chameleon of Accountability: Forms and Discourses,’ Accounting, Organizations and Society, vol. 20, no. 2/3, 1995, p. 221.

2 A Vance, P B Lowry & D Eggett, ‘Increasing Accountability Through User-Interface Design Artifacts: A New Approach to Addressing the Problem of Access-Policy Violations,’ MIS Quarterly, vol. 39, no. 2, 2015, p. 347.

3 G R Ferris, T R Mitchell, P J Canavan, D D Frink & H Hopper, 'Accountability in Human Resource Systems,' in S D Rosen, G R Ferris & D T Barnum (eds.), Handbook of Human Resource Management, Oxford, Blackwell Publishers, p. 187.

4 Sinclair, 'The Chameleon of Accountability,' p. 222.

5 K Mac Donald, D Rezania, R Baker, ‘A Grounded Theory and Examination of Project Managers’ Accountability,’ International Journal of Project Management, vol. 38, 2008, pp. 27-35.

6 D I Worrall, Accountability Leadership: How Great Leaders Build a High Performance Culture of Accountability and Responsibility, Worrall & Associates, 2013, p. 2.

7 M Bovens, The Quest for Responsibility: Accountability and Citizenship in Complex Organisations, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 38.

8 A Vance, P B Lowry & D Eggett, ‘Increasing Accountability Through User-Interface Design Artifacts: A New Approach to Addressing the Problem of Access-Policy Violations,’ MIS Quarterly, vol. 39, no. 2, 2015, pp. 348-349.

9 D I Worrall, Accountability Leadership, p. 5.

10 M Borrero, P Martens & G G Borrero, ‘Toward a Theory of Accountability,’ The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare, vol. 6, no. 6, 1979, p. 886.

11 Worrall, Accountability Leadership, pp. 5, 19.

12 P Cantero-Gomez, ‘The 5 Rules Followed by Accountable Leaders,’ 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/palomacanterogomez/2019/06/07/the-5-rules-followed-by-accountable-leaders/#1e04e550490f.

13 T Dewett, Performance Management: Setting Goals and Managing Performance, LinkedIn Learning, 2019, https://www.dhirubhai.net/learning/performance-management-setting-goals-and-managing-performance/next-steps?u=2126025; Worrall, Accountability Leadership, p. 27.

14 M McDonald, ‘Do Your Measures Make Employees Mad? Or Motivate Them?,’ 2018, https://www.gallup.com/workplace/231659/performance-measures-motivate-madden-employees.aspx; Worrall, Accountability Leadership, p. 25.

15 Worrall, Accountability Leadership, p. 26.

16 Worrall, Accountability Leadership, p. 59.

17 B Wigert & J Harter, ‘Re-Engineering Performance Management,’ Gallup Inc, 2017, p. 33.

18 Worrall, Accountability Leadership, pp. 2-5.

19 Borrero et al., ‘Toward a Theory of Accountability,’ p. 886.

20 M Bovens, ‘Two Concepts of Accountability: Accountability as a Virtue and as a Mechanism,’ West European Politics, vol. 33, no. 5, 2010, p. 955.

21 Vance et al., ‘Increasing Accountability Through User-Interface Design Artifacts,’ p. 2.

22 P Tetlock, ‘Accountability and Complexity of Thought,’ Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, vol. 45, no. 1, p. 82.

23 Vance et al., ‘Increasing Accountability Through User-Interface Design Artifacts’ p. 1.

24 S Lerner & P E Tetlock, ‘Accounting for the Effects of Accountability,’ Psychological Bulletin, vol. 125, no. 2, 1999, p. 259.

25 Vance et al., ‘Increasing Accountability Through User-Interface Design Artifacts,’ p. 2.