Responsibility must be bestowed, but accountability must be taken.
Craig Hickman, The Oz Principle
A 2012 article by the Harvard Business Review said: “By far and away
the single-most shirked responsibility of executives is holding people
accountable. No matter how tough a game they may talk about performance,
when it comes to holding people’s feet to the fire, leaders step back
from the heat.”
Accountability is a word thrown around a lot these
days. You hear it often in conversations about corporate and
governmental responsibility. Quite often, when something goes wrong, you
hear the rallying cry: “Someone should be held accountable!”
But is this way of looking at accountability really the most effective?
A
team member at one of Barry-Wehmiller’s Minnesota-based packaging
equipment companies always had trouble understanding the concept of
accountability.
“Does that mean,” he asked, “If someone has a
typo, you fire them? Does that mean if they stub their toe, you cut
their pay? Nobody had been able to answer that to my satisfaction.”
The meaning continued to escape him until he took Barry-Wehmiller University’s
Culture of Service Foundations class. Over three days, this course
works to shape new ideas around service – from re-defining a customer
from an external person to your co-worker, your family, even someone
you’ve never met. It teaches the idea that service is taking action to
meet the needs of someone else. Therefore, a culture of service is a
shared purpose where everyone is meeting the needs of others inside and
outside the organization. As we say in the class, “Anyone becomes a
customer at the moment we have an opportunity to serve.”
A
critical part of service, accountability receives a new definition in
the class, too. For this team member, it was like a light bulb had been
switched on in his head. He learned that responsibility is given, but
accountability has to be taken.
“Accountability is not about
holding someone else’s feet to the fire,” said one of our Culture of
Service professors. “It’s not about projecting an expectation onto them.
It’s about one person having an intrinsic sense of ownership of a job
or task and then the willingness to face the consequences of its success
or failure. It’s about helping to light a fire inside of them.
“And
as leaders, we have to realize that we can’t force this on anyone. Our
job as leaders is to create environments that give people the space and
freedom to take initiative themselves. We can’t control how a person
chooses to behave in a particular moment. In a sense, it’s a fallacy to
assume we can ‘motivate’ our people. Motivation comes from within.”
When
the light bulb went off in our team member’s head, he now knew it was
his responsibility to position others to be successful. Now, when he
approaches his team, he asks himself, “How can I facilitate the idea of
taking accountability?” He seeks input on what people need to be
successful in their roles. He works to remove obstacles for others. He
deals one-on-one with those who may have a “defeatist attitude” in order
to address real concerns and asks others to simply commit to doing
their best.
“When we commit to something with our whole hearts, we
do everything in our power to make it happen,” he said. “And the vast
majority of the time we’re successful. Occasionally, when we fail,
there’s nothing anyone can say that will mean as much as how we already
feel.”
As a truly human leader, don’t step back from the heat. Bring the kindling to help light the fire inside your team.