Building High-Performance Cultures with the Effective Point of Accountability
As consultants, we don’t have much authority within our client’s organization; we only have the authority that our clients give us. This constrains us from directly implementing our recommendations.
But what about within the organization? Does your client understand how accountability works in the organization? How can we as consultants help clients understand the nature of accountability? Even more so, how do we help our clients create a culture of accountability?
Accountability matters. Intuitively we know that when people are held to account performance is better. But what is accountability? How does an organization “become” accountable?
Effective delegation should ensure a single point of accountability, as low as possible in the organization, but there are often miscues. Most organizations also struggle with silos. Today’s organizations are so complex that almost everyone relies on others for success in their work.
The Effective Point of Accountability®, developed by Effective Managers™, provides a model for solving both problems. This approach helps organizations ensure that work is delegated to the right person in the right position, and to ensure that managers in different parts of the organization have a common understanding of their work relationships with each other.
This starts with the question: “What is accountability, and how does it impact managerial success?”
We often hear the term accountability used to describe individuals that are “not being held accountable” or individuals “needing to take more accountability” for their actions. These issues are typically raised when something goes wrong: “Who is accountable for that mess?”
What is it about accountability that makes it so difficult to understand?
Accountability versus responsibility. Accountability isn’t the easiest term to grasp, and there’s often a tendency to confuse it with responsibility. Here’s how the two are different. With accountability, someone is held to account and the action must result. By contrast, responsibility is more values driven, coming from within. In other words, one who is accountable must complete something. But one who feels responsible truly believes that what they need to do is important. To be clear, responsibility is essential in organizations. Workers should feel responsible for doing good work and completing tasks. Nevertheless, there is a clear difference between responsibility and accountability.
In organizational accountability, we have been able to measure the difference between Clarity of Accountability as delegated by a manager, and Felt Accountability as taken on by the individual.
Managers must define clear expectations so that their team members know exactly what it is they will be held accountable for as they go about their work.
Breaking Down Silos
Workers in organizations to-day are highly interdependent. There are few positions where one is not dependent on others in some way for success in their own work. For managerial roles, interdependence is a fact of life.
The following figure shows the results of a research project into managerial effectiveness carried out in partnership between Effective Managers™ and the Telfer School of Business at the University of Ottawa. In this part of the research, managers were asked several questions about their interdependence with others.
A manager in Production is focused completely on an issue within the department. The Director of Production has called all hands on deck to get that problem solved. Meanwhile, a manager in Finance is accountable to generate a Production report which requires obtaining updated information from the manager in Production. One can immediately see the conflict… the Finance manager relies on the Leasing manager for success. The Leasing manager does not see this work as a priority, and probably will not even see it as “real work”, but as a favour.
The opposite happens regularly as well when Production managers depend on Finance, Human Resources, Purchasing and other departments for success. But how often are the Production manager’s priorities seen as a priority by those in the other departments?
A larger question is whether these respective managers are resourced appropriately to support each other in these ways. Or are these cross functional duties seen by managers as “good to do if I have time”?
Think about driving a vehicle in a busy city. If there are no commonly understood rules of the road – no stop signs, direction signs, or traffic lights – it would be chaos. People would not be able to get where they want to go. In fact, complete gridlock would ensue.
The same is true in organizations. By not having an accountability and authority framework for how work is delegated down the organization, and how work flows across the organization, time and energy will be wasted.
Without rules of the road or “rules of work” in the organization, conflict occurs, and people do not understand how to work with each other. As a result, work does not get done, or it is done badly. We call this organizational churn because much energy has been expended for less than the expected results.
Getting this right starts at the top of the organization.
CMC Canada Workshop
CMC-Canada is offering a 3 hour workshop led my Dwight Mihalicz, CMC® to explore this issues and how you can apply them in organizations. This class provides insights for management consultants to understand an organization’s issues that may be caused by a lack of an accountability and authority framework within the organization.
This session goes to the next level, where participants will work with the concepts of accountability and authority and how a framework can help to drive a client’s organization performance.
Participants will receive a workbook which includes images of all of the slides and supplementary materials and resources.
Participants will also receive resources and tools which they can immediately use in their practice.
Learning Objectives
In this session, participants will learn:
- What accountability is, and why it is important for top organizational performance
- The five accountabilities necessary for effective managerial leadership and clear delegation of work.
- The three forms of cross functional work and how they help to reduce organizational gridlock (silos)
- How to identify organizational issues that result from a lack of accountability.
- How to help CEOs and executives understand the importance of an accountability framework and how it can be implemented.
Learn More
Follow this link to the CMC Canada web site to register for this event.
https://cmc-canada.site-ym.com/events/EventDetails.aspx?alias=buildinghighperformancecultures2024
