Despite the countless management and leadership books written about the virtue of accountability, according to most employees there are significant gaps between managements knowing and doing. Few employees believe that their organizations do a good job of holding individuals or teams accountable. While they believe they are personally accountable, they don’t always believe that others in their organization are held to the same “high” standards.  Even well intended managers will fuel these perceptions. Excuses like “they’re new to the job,” or “I probably wasn’t clear in my directions,” can sound more like management giving “permission” to an employee to under perform or a hesitancy to have a difficult conversation, than the commitment to fairness it might otherwise be.

The opposite track, being too quick to act or terminate an employee whose results are off target (i.e. “John’s outcomes are awful. He needs to go”) can often keep a team from looking at larger issues in market conditions or organizational performance that isn’t about John’s performance. Additionally, a manager who is slow to coach and fast to terminate can erode an organization’s commitment to its employees.

Management 101 teaches us that by helping our employees to become more accountable, we make our teams more productive. The opposite is also true. When management drifts off the habits of “accountability,” a culture of finger pointing, blame, and gossip often takes hold.  Issues in productivity and outcomes, almost always follow.

Unfortunately, individual managers – senior, middle, and entry level leadership roles – don’t always understand their personal role in an organization’s “accountability culture.” While most managers believe they hold their own team members accountable, many have a hard time seeing others doing the same. And when the going gets tough, and results are off target, even high performing managers can look to “others”—a better resourced competitor, an underperforming colleague, an overly demanding customer, or an insensitive senior management as the reason. Anytime a manager takes their eyes off their own performance and what they can impact, and looks for explanations of outcomes outside themselves, accountability suffers.

In her book Fearless Leadership, Loretta Malandro, PhD., says that, for a business to create an accountability culture management accountability must be 100 %— each manager must become “personally accountable for their impact on people, even if others accept zero accountability.” Dr. Malandro is clearly stating the management challenge; it always has to start within.

Managers also need to understand that the drift in an organization’s culture of accountability happens slowly, then suddenly. While accountability is an intellectually simple concept, in reality it is both emotionally and behaviorally complex. A healthy accountability culture requires 100% of its leadership to first hold themselves fully accountable for their own behavior and outcomes in light of a large number of factors they don’t directly control. How easy is it for a manager to say “if only our sales team would have brought in more new clients we would have made our numbers?” or “if only our product had                 , we would have sold more business?” Accountability starts with individual manager’s doing individual work to ensure they are always acting and talking in ways that supports both organizational teamwork and accountability.

And managers, who take their mission to develop people seriously, often struggle to find that balance between holding people accountable, while empowering them to make mistakes. Their goal is to help employees work from their strengths, while making sure their weaknesses don’t knock them over. Even the thoughtful decision to terminate an underperforming but high impact employee, requires careful organizational planning that will impact the perception of accountability. None of the balancing acts that in their aggregate reflect how you are managing “accountability” are as easy and straight forward as others would like.

It is my belief that a fully accountable culture represents an aspirational vision that is rarely fully achieved, but can produce a whole lot of small but “made a difference” successes along the way.

So how do individual managers go about creating a culture of accountability? We have a handful of suggestions, starting with a good reflection of where you are now.  

How are you managing your own team?

How are you conducting yourself as a company leader?

Are you avoiding the accountability eroding assumptions?

Accountability is an important element in the work we do, to work with our clients to find and place the right employee for each request we fill—either for a job candidate to be hired by our client directly, a short term temporary or contract assignment, or a complex project level assignment involving full team engagement. One of the important side benefits of “temporary” workers is that their accountabilities can generally be defined in simple terms—“achieve this result in this way, ” but the degree to which our customers can spell out these simple statements, the greater the probability that our employee will perform as expected. Our client’s chances for a successful temporary or contract assignment are directly impacted by the quality of information they can provide to all of their employees up front about their business (the context) and their expectations (the deliverable).

We also encourage our clients to provide their temporary and contract employees with timely feedback relative to those expectations—as early in the assignment as possible and as ongoing as is needed. Many issues in employee performance, particularly in temporary or contract roles, stems from the employees not clearly understanding the client’s expectations. Keep in mind many temporary and contract employees go from assignment to assignment, with their client’s expectations changing at each assignment. Early course corrections to clarify your expectations can make a huge difference.

When it comes to organizational accountability or a culture of accountability, neither PACE Staffing Network or me as its CEO claims to be an expert, but if you’d like to discuss our editorial content on this significant management practice in more detail, feel free to contact me at jeannek@pacestaffing.com.