An organization that uses the word constantly usually has very little of it. The word is doing the work the practice is not.
What accountability actually requires is unglamorous and mostly happens before anything is done.
It is built at the front, not the back
Most attempts at accountability are retrospective. Something failed, and a leader now wants to establish who is answerable and why it happened.
If the standard was never stated, the measure was never agreed, and no review point was set, there is nothing to hold anyone to. What is occurring is the allocation of blame against a standard invented after the outcome was known, and everyone in the room can tell. It is also unjust in a way people feel precisely even when they cannot articulate it, and one instance of it will make the next several months of candid reporting considerably harder to obtain.
Three things have to be agreed in advance. What result, by when, measured how. Each sounds too obvious to require stating and each is routinely left vague, because being precise at the outset forces a conversation about whether the target is achievable, and that conversation is uncomfortable while there is still time to have it.
Activity is not the result
Surveillance measures activity. Accountability measures results. Organizations slide from the second to the first without deciding to, and the slide has a specific cause.
Activity is continuously observable. Hours logged, calls made, meetings attended, keystrokes. Results are observable only later, and sometimes much later. A leader who is anxious and has not defined the result with enough precision to track it will reach for the thing that can be watched today, and will experience the watching as diligence.
What the organization learns is that the observable thing is the real standard. People are not being cynical when they optimise for it. They are reading the evidence correctly, and the evidence is that presence at the desk is measured weekly while the outcome is measured never.
Consider a plant where the maintenance target is unplanned downtime below two percent. That number is checkable, it is the actual objective, and holding someone to it requires no visibility into how they spend Tuesday. The moment a leader begins asking why the supervisor was not on the floor at ten, the standard has quietly changed, and the supervisor now has two jobs: the downtime figure and the appearance of being everywhere.
What surveillance costs
Three things, and the third is the one that matters most to a leader trying to develop people.
It signals that the stated result is not really the standard, which undermines every future attempt to set one. It teaches the management of appearance, a skill that displaces the actual work and is difficult to unlearn. And it destroys the information you would have obtained by letting someone run their own way, which is the only means by which you find out whether they can.
That last point is worth sitting with. A leader who monitors continuously has, at the end of a year, no evidence about anyone’s independent judgment. They have a year of observations about compliance.
The conversation when the result is missed
This is where accountability becomes real or becomes decoration, and there are three parts to doing it properly.
Establish what actually happened before assigning any weight to it, including the possibility that the approach was sound and conditions moved. A missed number is not by itself evidence of a bad decision, and treating it as one teaches people to avoid anything uncertain.
Ask what they would do differently, and listen to whether the answer is specific. Vague answers usually indicate the person has not yet worked out what went wrong, which is itself the finding.
Then state the consequence, and have one. Accountability without any consequence at any point is a vocabulary exercise. The consequence need not be severe and frequently should not be, but a standard that is missed repeatedly with no change in anyone’s situation is not a standard, and everyone watching has already worked that out.
The opposite failure
Leaders who dislike surveillance sometimes arrive at no accountability at all, and describe it as trust.
Trust is not the absence of a standard. It is the willingness to leave someone alone between the standard being set and the point at which it is measured. A leader who sets nothing, watches nothing, and reviews nothing has not extended trust. They have withdrawn, and the people working for them experience it as being unmanaged rather than as being trusted, which is a considerably less pleasant condition than it sounds.
The arrangement people actually want is a clear target, genuine latitude in the middle, and someone who looks seriously at the result when it arrives. That combination is rarer than either of the failures on its sides.
Edited by Patrick J. Wolf, PhD