Breaking Through the Accountability Barrier
Ujima Donalson, Director, Professional & Organizational Development
As the book Crucial Accountability aptly illustrates, most of us simply aren’t comfortable with confronting people—whether that’s the stranger who cuts in line at the movies or the employee who misses a deadline. Looking the other way in the movie line is one thing; that only affects us at a specific place for a short time. We will get to the front of the line, and only a few seconds or minutes later than without the breach.
One might think that in the workplace, where the stakes are higher and the impacts longer-term, people would be more likely to speak up. But research, as well as many of our own experiences, shows that few excel at holding others accountable. The good news is that, daunting though it may seem, we can break through the cultural barrier of staying silent as well as the nearly universal personal barrier of avoiding confrontation.
The Culture of Unaccountability
Looking the other way when employees fail to keep commitments, meet agreed-upon expectations, or complete assignments in a timely manner creates a culture of unaccountability. In short, not holding people accountable damages a leader’s credibility, kills morale, and breeds ambiguity, distrust, negativity, and inefficiency.
As Crucial Accountability explains, in some organizations a lack of follow-through is endemic, and “something came up” is a readily accepted excuse. The authors contend that “allowing failure eventually destroys results and relationships” and issue the following warning:
Nothing destroys trust more than casually giving assignments and then hoping against hope that people will deliver. You may like the fact that your boss doesn’t always follow up with you, giving you substantial freedom, but you hate it when others are equally loose and unpredictable.
But, really, is it that bad? In a word, yes. Imagine a workplace where employees don’t know which deadlines are “real,” wonder why certain people are allowed to skip meetings or assignments without penalty, and speculate how some of their peers get away with only performing half their job. Such an environment would be ambiguous, confusing, and unpredictable (resulting in distrust and negativity). Further, in a workplace where people regularly fail to do what’s expected, two things tend to happen: lapses become the norm and work-arounds spring up everywhere (both of which create inefficiencies). What about the morale of the team and the credibility of the manager? Rock bottom.
At POD, in our research and through our work with 360-degree assessments and team performance surveys, we have witnessed the trickle-down effects of unaccountability. Unsurprisingly, relatively low ratings for accountability and integrity often correlate with relatively low ratings for communication, conflict resolution, and employee development. What is perhaps surprising is how often accomplished leaders rate themselves lower on accountability—and are rated lower by their manager, peers, and direct reports—than on other competencies such as collaboration, innovation, strategic thinking, and problem-solving/decision-making.
So, why does accountability loom in our minds like Mount Everest, impossible for all but the truly exceptional to conquer?
Why Accountability Seems So Hard
Let’s revisit the stranger who cuts in the movie line. The authors of Crucial Accountability performed field research—cutting in line, reading over strangers’ shoulders, even sampling food off students’ plates in a college cafeteria—and found that, time and again, people didn’t speak up. Crucial Accountability posits that the “mental math” we perform determines it’s just not worth it. “It was only a minor infraction of little consequence, and speaking up might actually cause a problem.”
On the other hand, consider how we think about people who don’t stay silent. As Crucial Accountability puts it, people typically either choose silence or violence. Many of us have either been on the giving or receiving end of this kind of “violence”—that is, publicly berating someone, aggressively criticizing someone, yelling at someone in a domineering way, and the like. We have few, if any, positive examples of calling someone out on an infraction. As a consequence, in our minds accountability is a matter of either perpetuating the problem by saying nothing or speaking up and creating a new problem. Either way, we lose.
Another barrier to accountability arises from our tendency to assume the worst and fabricate stories about why people do (or don’t do) certain things. As I like to say, absent of information, people will make up a story! Crucial Accountability sheds light on this common problem:
Assuming that others do contrary things because it’s in their makeup or they actually enjoy doing them and then ignoring any other potential motivational forces is a mistake. Psychologists classify this mistake as an attribution error. And because it happens so consistently across people, times, and places, it gets a name all its own. It’s called the fundamental attribution error.
If we put the fundamental attribution error on top of everything else—our mental math, our cultural norm to avoid conflict, the false dichotomy of silence or violence—we easily create an accountability mountain out of what might be a reasonably sized molehill.
Accountability Starts With You
A good place to begin is with the correlation between accountability and integrity. Two fundamentals of leading with integrity that tie directly to accountability are awareness and fairness.
Awareness. In order to create a culture of accountability we must be able to be honest with ourselves and others about whether expectations are being satisfied or neglected, which requires us to be observant, attentive, and fully present.
Recently, through reading Daniel Goleman’s Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence, I’ve developed a greater appreciation for the role of awareness in successful leadership. Goleman cautions that “a leader tuned out of his internal world will be rudderless; one blind to the world of others will be clueless; those indifferent to the larger systems in which they operate will be blindsided.” In short, we can only manage effectively once we’re operating at an optimal level of awareness on multiple fronts.
Goleman authored the groundbreaking book Emotional Intelligence, and in Focus he calls upon cognitive science as he writes about our brain’s “two semi-independent, largely separate mental systems.” Our “bottom-up” mind allows us to operate efficiently and intuitively, but we sometimes coast on auto-pilot when we should be calling upon our slower but more reflective “top-down” mind. In other words, we may treat some things as routine—a staff meeting, a quarterly report, yet another email—that in fact require top-down focus.
Increased focus sharpens our perception, broadens our view, and helps us develop a clear picture about what’s really going on in the workplace. I believe that this, in turn, can help guide our accountability compass, directing us when and how to speak up.
Fairness. The other, perhaps more obvious, fundamental of leading with integrity is fairness: treating people equitably and holding everyone to the same standard. Sometimes leaders throw up their hands. How can I treat everyone the same when I’m dealing with seventeen different people who have seventeen different levels of experience and ability and are doing nine different jobs? But holding everyone to the same standard isn’t expecting exactly the same performance and production from everyone. It’s expecting each individual to satisfy agreed-upon expectations—for instance, by performing the core functions of their job, attending required meetings, keeping commitments, meeting deadlines, and so on.
There will always be top performers—people who are exceptionally talented, motivated, or ambitious and regularly exceed expectations. Too often, we let top performers do what they do best, and they end up carrying the weight of others’ responsibilities on their shoulders. Sure, things might get done, but the playing field is not level, and allowing some to coast while others accomplish creates the culture of unaccountability.
A caveat. Keep in mind that everyone has difficult periods. A death or illness in the family. A spouse being laid off. A child with severe problems at school. If you are leading with integrity, along with a high level of awareness, you will easily and instinctually know when an employee is struggling due to personal problems or other such external factors. In those rare cases, it’s okay to ease up when you do so with intention and integrity, and when you’re honest with yourself and your employees about what you’re doing and why.
We sometimes—wrongly—think of accountability as cracking the whip. Once we can disabuse ourselves of that notion and see ourselves, as described in Crucial Accountability, “as facilitators, enablers, and supporters” the whole game changes. Curious? Please tune in next issue for more on this topic!
This article is the first of a two-part series on accountability. In the Winter 2015 issue I’ll explore having a successful accountability conversation and mastering the principles of accountability. For leaders who are eager to dive in and want to further enrich their understanding of accountability, I highly recommend the book on which much of this article is based: Crucial Accountability: Tools for Resolving Violated Expectations, Broken Commitments, and Bad Behavior by Kerry Patterson, et al.
