Why do we need accountability and why is it so hard? In this episode, Jenni looks at how lack of accountability can cause chaos, its impact on trust, and the reasons why it’s critical to employee engagement. She suggests ways to improve accountability for you and others, and how to strengthen the link to organisational culture.
Things that will help you go from chaos to calm:
Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) by Carol Tavis and Elliot Aronson
Blog: How RASCI can help you gain clarity and calm
Podcast: How to be heard with productive disagreement by Calm Edged Rebels
Blog: The positive practice of productive disagreement by Calm Edged Rebels
Podcast: I’m Sorry: How to Apologize and Why It Matters, Part 1 of 2 and I’m Sorry: How to Apologize and Why It Matters, Part 2 of 2 by Brené Brown: Unlocking Us.
Dare to Lead by Brené Brown
Frey admits lying; Oprah apologizes to viewers
You can continue the conversation with Jenni on Twitter and LinkedIn
Transcript for this podcast
Welcome to this episode of Redefining Comms with me, Jenni Field. Today, I’m going to be talking about accountability and specifically why it can be hard. Now, it’s a topic that comes up again and again when we look at leadership and with decisions needing to be made. Sometimes situations are changing, it can be really hard to be accountable.
Now, for some, being accountable is naturally uncomfortable, but if we are to lead, we have to be accountable. So, for me, this always links us into conversations around culture and it’s becoming really clear that culture and accountability are incredibly blended when we’re looking at organisational change.
So in this episode, I’m going to talk about why accountability is needed and how it can cause chaos. I’m then going to share three reasons why I believe accountability is hard. And I’ll also share why it’s important when it comes to employee engagement.
And then I want to delve into four things for you to do if you’re looking to improve yours or others’ accountability. And alongside that, I’ll share what you need to look at when it comes to culture and accountability. I’ve got around three things there for you to consider.
Why is accountability needed?
Well, we have a hard time with accountability. You know, taking responsibility for our actions is sometimes hugely uncomfortable. And this is partly because we’re just not very good at admitting when we’ve made mistakes. And we’re not very good because our brains will do whatever they can to justify action so that we feel better about our decisions. And I’m not going to go into the detail on that today, but there’s lots to explore around how we can justify what we do so that we make sure that we’re comfortable with all of the decisions that we have made.
So, when we have done something, we need to be accountable for that. And if that something has been damaging, it takes a huge amount of vulnerability and courage to really stand up and say, “I was wrong.” Now, accountability is needed because it’s there to ensure there is trust in our relationships at work. You know, without it, trust will just break down. People will think that there are no boundaries and it’s likely that chaos will follow.
Now, in a book that I read recently, it’s called “Mistakes Were Made But Not By Me.” And it’s by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. And they tell the story of a time when Oprah Winfrey publicly backed an author who had fabricated large parts of their book. Now, there was lots of speculation. There was lots of the publishers were involved. Oprah had backed them and I think even joined a talk show to kind of show public support. But after a while, she realised that her backing of the author was actually quite misplaced. And she publicly took accountability for that. You know, she stood up on her show and said, “You know, I feel duped. But more importantly, I feel that you betrayed millions of readers.”
And that’s, you know, what she was saying to him. And there was a journalist that commented on this saying how amazing it was to see Oprah Winfrey sort of stand up and say, you know, I was I was wrong, really. And that takes, you know, a huge amount of vulnerability and courage to do that. And I’ll touch more on that later on in this episode.
But it’s this example for me that shows the importance of accountability and how it links so directly to trust. You know, Oprah has a responsibility to millions of people, viewers and fans and everyone around the world. And therefore, to ensure that they still trusted her, it was really important that the accountability was there for maybe a misplaced judgement.
How does it cause chaos in the workplace?
Well, a lack of accountability will lead to all sorts of symptoms of chaos. You’ll see things like micromanaging. You’ll see broken promises. You’ll probably see apathy as a general trait. You’ll see people going through the motions. There’ll be people who are disengaged, frustrated, resentful. A kind of general lack of care in terms of the work that they’re doing. So there’s lots of elements and symptoms around this that are going to lead to elements of chaos.
You know, trust is very personal to us. And as a result, so is accountability. Now, I believe accountability is hard for three reasons.
1. It is uncomfortable
The first is that we don’t like holding people to account because, quite simply, it’s just uncomfortable. You know, having to sort of call out somebody’s behaviour or say to somebody, “This isn’t acceptable to me,” is quite often an uncomfortable place to be. Now, I’ll always say that we’re going to have to get a bit uncomfortable to get comfortable. So, if somebody has broken a boundary with you or someone’s done something that doesn’t sit right for your values, we have to hold them to account for that. We have to say, you know, that wasn’t acceptable to me and have a conversation about it.
That’s really important when it comes to our own boundaries and things like that. But if we don’t know we’ve done something wrong because no one tells us, we will never learn and change. So the uncomfortableness is one of the reasons why I think we find it quite difficult.
2. Fear of being wrong
The second is that I think we’re often quite scared that our decisions or our opinion will be wrong and it might offend someone. And because we have this natural need to be liked, it means that we will naturally shy away from kind of coming out and having quite a firm opinion on things.
We see this, probably have seen this quite a lot in the last couple of years. So we can get quite worried that the decision or the opinion or anything we’re going to do is going to be wrong. And that will often stop us from stepping forwards to be in a place where we can be held accountable.
3. Distancing from decisions
And the third thing is that we’ve put in place things to distance ourselves from decisions. So by creating brands and organisations or saying that teams are responsible, we’ve really reduced accountability. You know, because if I buy a car from, I don’t know, Peugeot or Volvo, there’s lots of other car manufacturers out there.
Then, I am buying it from Peugeot, which is a brand. I’m not buying it from, you know, Fred, who makes cars, you know, thousands of years ago. It’s very different now. It’s a very different transactional relationship. And as a result, there’s no sort of person necessarily that you can hold to account. And I think individually that makes us less accountable.
You know, in previous podcast episodes, I’ve talked about the RASCII model. And I’ll pop a link to the blog post on that. But that’s why when we look at that model and you’re listing people in the different columns and the A stands for accountable, you can only have one name in there. You can’t have a team in there. It has to be a person because it’s easy for us to say, “Oh, HR are responsible or operations team are responsible.” But that’s too many people. That can’t be, you know, a whole team responsible. It has to be a person.
Why is it important for employee engagement?
Well, it’s really for all the reasons it creates chaos. You know, if you’ve got people who are feeling frustrated, resentful, all of those things, that’s not what you want if you want an engaged and efficient organisation, you know, if our leaders aren’t accountable for decisions, the trust will break down. And, you know, if I witness people allowing behaviours that aren’t aligned to our values and our culture, then I’m going to feel like they don’t really care about our culture or our values. And that feels very personal. It’s like you don’t care about me. You know, there’s quite often the excuse of, “Oh, that’s just so and so. They’ve always been like that. That’s just how it is.”
But if you’re trying to shift a culture or you’re trying to embed a culture, whatever it might be, you’ve got to have some element of accountability. And we’ve all got to get behind the fact that this isn’t OK, you know, and maybe it’s never been OK. And we’ve got to be uncomfortable to have that conversation. Because without that, you’re just going to make me lose faith in you as a person, as a leader, but also in the culture of the place that I work. And really, the impact of ignoring accountability or of not working through those things is just going to be damaging from a retention perspective for your organisation.
You know, if we don’t hold people to account, we are allowing behaviours that aren’t aligned to our own or that of our organisation. And they will be impacting those around us probably more than we realise, because we get this apathy and we get people just feeling, you know, frustrated and a bit resentful. People don’t always vocalise those. And that’s important. You know, you’ve got to look out for the silence there, because when we’re looking at employee engagement, it’s also important to see what’s not said. And that’s just as important.
How do we help people become more accountable or how can we be more accountable ourselves?
So, these are the four things I want to cover with you in terms of probably the things I talk about most when it comes to accountability.
1. Make sure you do the work
You know, if you’re going to do something that has an impact on others, you have to make sure that you’re really comfortable knowing what that impact is. You’re comfortable being questioned on it. You know what the questions might be. You know how to answer those. You’ve done your research. You’ve done your reading. You’ve got the detail. You know, and that’s all about kind of prepping and planning and all those things. So, we’ve got to do the work if we’ve got sort of a big announcement or a big change or something big that we’re talking about.
2. Get comfortable with productive disagreement
Now, this was a whole podcast episode I did with the wonderful Advita Patel and Trudy Lewis on our Carmed Rebels podcast. Now, I’ve popped the link in the show notes because it’s a really good listen. But I’ve also added a link to the blog we shared about it. So, if you don’t want to listen to a podcast, you can just read the blog and see the tips in there.
But it’s important to acknowledge that being accountable isn’t about everybody agreeing with you. So we’ve got to be able to have productive disagreement and respectful conversation in order to work through things that might not be comfortable for other people.
3. Not just about ethics, there has to be morals too
And morals are your own principles about what’s right or wrong. And it’s important that you make decisions that are ethical, so they are in line with the rules, but also morally OK. You know, if you’re making decisions that aren’t ethical or morally right, then being accountable for them will be challenging.
Now, I say that. But at the same time, at the start of this episode, I mentioned that our brains will justify anything to make us feel OK about the decisions we’ve made. So, think about who’s around you when you’re making decisions, because that’s also really important.
4. Learn how to say sorry
Now, this is really important, and it’s something I learned more about when listening to a Brene Brown podcast. One of her podcasts is called Unlocking Us. And she did an episode that was over two parts all about how to say sorry.
And I’ve popped the link in the show notes to it. But it’s really worth a listen, because what I took from that was really the fact that you can’t just sort of hammer someone if they’ve done something wrong. And actually, if you want the relationship to survive, no matter what part you played in that maybe breaking down, it’s always good to say sorry. So it’s a really good listen. And sometimes we shy away from saying sorry, like it’s a really bad thing. So that one’s a really good one.
So they are my four tips around kind of what you need to do to build it in yourself or in others.
How do we help people become more accountable within culture?
And then I said I would share a couple that are linked more to sort of culture and accountability, because the two go so hand in hand.
1. You can’t have one without the other
There has to be accountability for a culture to thrive. You know, if people aren’t held to account for poor behaviours, then you’re really just wasting your effort of trying to change a culture if you’re not going to change some of those elements of accountability alongside it.
2. Accountability needs to be within conversations and reviews
For behaviours and values to be part of your DNA, you know, part of your culture, then there has to be accountability baked into performance reviews and appraisals and conversations.
If it’s not in there, then it’s not really going to be how things are done around here, which is often the definition of culture. And therefore, that accountability isn’t going to isn’t going to stick.
3. Recontracting relationships with your team
And the third is really something to really think about right now. And that’s about recontracting your relationships with your team. So, making sure that you’re not dismissing things because it’s how it’s always been, that you’re working together to create an environment that’s psychologically safe for people to hold people to account. And that’s really important, that psychologically safe piece, because when we hold people to account, it’s got to be done in a way that isn’t, you know, disrespectful to somebody.
Now, I mentioned Oprah earlier, and I also mentioned vulnerability and courage, and I’ve already mentioned Brene Brown’s podcast, but I can’t wrap this up without mentioning her book, Dare to Lead, which is all about daring leadership. So, if this is something you’re looking at or want to explore, I thoroughly recommend that and I’ll pop a link in the show notes to it as well.
Thank you for listening!
Now, in my next episode, I’m going to be talking about how to communicate change. Now, this isn’t a new topic at all, but I want to rapidly look at change in organisations today. You know, why things fail, what to consider when that happens, you know, how to do it effectively, because I think there’s a need to just go through that in the quick 15 minutes that we have to just explore what we might need to do a little bit differently. And now we’re out of the pandemic.
So, thank you for listening. As always, I’d love to continue this conversation on Twitter or LinkedIn. So, please connect, ask questions, share your thinking with me. And details are in the show notes on how to stay in touch.
