Does your workplace have a toxic accountability culture? One where 'accountability' has come to mean 'blame'?
Rightly or wrongly, in cultures like this people expect the process of accountability to be one where they are required to explain themselves, often to more powerful others who will render an evaluation and decide the consequences.
These things impact psychological safety, directly provoking behaviours such as defensiveness, justification and attribution... which are almost exactly the opposite of the transparency, responsibility and mutuality that healthy accountability requires.
I'm going to call this first sort of accountability culture one of 'Holding to Account'.
But there is another type of accountability culture (and it's not the equally toxic culture where accountability is absent). I'm going to call these healthy accountability cultures ones of 'Helping to Account'.
They rely on 3 key behaviours:
- Helping to Account
- Bias to Action
- Locating Responsibility
Helping to Account
This behaviour is about getting alongside people, working with them to reflect accurately and to tune into what's happening, what's not happening that should be and why. It uses questions to discover how people are seeing things, where there is agreement and disagreement, etc. It seeks to identify and explore assumptions and blind spots, to notice where and why people are feeling pressure and where they do and don’t have energy to take action. It treats instances where something hasn't been bang on as opportunities to understand the causes and find solutions, not as occassions to render judgement.
"Helping to Account" is explicitly NOT about evaluation. Instead it is about building shared situational awareness and mutual understanding.
Bias to Action
Good 'Helping to Account' isn't an end in itself. It's purpose is to put people who work together in a position to commit to shared action. That's how things get done.
However, sometimes tricky situations arise where there is disagreement about what's happening or what's needed. When this happens it's important to shift focus from reflecting together (which may devlove into debating opinions and making value judgements) to learning together through action.
The emphasis becomes, "What do we need to go and learn together?" and not, "Whose opinion wins?".
This can be extremely energising - an opportunity to avoid analysis paralysis and lotus eating, and a clear signal that what matters is moving forward positively not getting stuck evaluating the past.
Locating Responsibility
This behaviour is about ensuring clarity so that everyone knows what they are committing to and what they can expect from each other. It pays to be pedantic. What exactly is to be done, by who, by when, with what support, to what purpose, how will we know it’s done, etc? This isn't micro-management. It's about coproducing the action and support so that everyone knows what is expected of them and everyone is comfortable that this is a reasonable expectation that they are committed to.
It pays to approach this with an attitude of 'Little and Often'. When framing action it can be very tempting to agree grand plans and long term goals. This can feel strategic, purposeful, efficient. In practice though, as the cycle time between agreeing and reviewing actions eeks out, people find themselves taking on too much and dealing in generalisations and abstractions rather than concrete facts of the matter. Too much happens between one meeting and the next and peoples working lives are too complex and busy, and so action reviews devolve back into trading opinions and value judgements. Getting the cycle time between action and review right is key to building momentum but even more key to keeping people anchored to each other, to reality and to the commitments they have made.
A Cycle
And it's in how we close the loop on these commitments that any accountability culture will stand or fall. Having framed action and support together we will either follow through or not. When the answer is that we did not we have a choice - to go back to a culture of 'holding to account' or to stick with the practice of 'helping to account'.
Format: Blog
Tags: How To
Comments
No comments on this post yet.