Signs that accountability is low in your organization
This article is the first of a series on the topic of accountability:
Article Overview/TL;DR
While most leaders know accountability is important, they tend to have a binary view of it, and it’s often avoided until it can’t be. The first step in building a culture of accountability is to recognise where low accountability.
Look out for:
Executives asking “who’s accountable for this?” when something goes wrong.
Unclear goals and expectations, in addition to lack of focus across teams.
Weak commitments and goals regularly being thrown out.
Low visibility of work and poor feedback structures.
Low organisation turnover due to little or no performance management.
Most leaders know that accountability is a critical component of a high-performance culture. It’s a topic that I hear a lot about in my coaching and consulting work with leaders, teams, and organizations. When I run organizational assessments to gain an understanding of where a department can improve, my first question is usually “What happens in your organization if goals aren‘t met?” The answer? “...Nothing.”
Sometimes it’s a thinly-veiled question about who’s at fault for issues and how they’ll be punished. Other times it’s leaders saying that they don’t want to hold people accountable, because they think it goes against psychological safety or team autonomy (we’ll debunk these points later). This highlights that there is a very binary view of accountability: “Accountability means asking for people to be punished”.
Accountability isn’t always easy! At the same time, it’s also a key part of building high-performing teams, enabling team autonomy, and fostering psychological safety. That’s why I decided to write a series about it - to help anyone who’s struggling with building a high-accountability culture in an organization, and to help you define how you can hold people accountable, while being respectful and treating them humanely. You’ll find out: How to spot low accountability, how to build a culture of accountability, and hear from an expert who’s navigated the world of accountability successfully (and humanely).
So, what does a lack of accountability look like in an organization? As I review organizational processes and speak with teams, I look for the following signs:
Executives ask, “who’s accountable?” This is usually the first big flag: Not only the fact that the question needs to be asked at all, but also the fact that it’s most often asked when things go wrong, or, worse, have been going wrong for a while.
Result: This usually leads to several managers feeling micromanaged, frustrated, and going into hectic mode to either attempt to disprove them or come up with an explanation for the complex reasons behind the failure. Executives feel like they aren’t greeting clear answers and lean further into micromanagement mode. Ultimately, frustrations pile up all around.
Goals and expectations aren’t clear. Managers, teams, and individuals don’t have clear goals, know what success looks like, nor what the company expects of them. On the flip side, it’s unclear what happens in the case of failure.·
Result: Fear of failure, decreased psychological safety, decreased innovation. Teams and individuals take fewer risks.
Teams have too much work to do and no focus. The company has more than one “top priority” initiative. Discussions don’t lead to action: People say “someone should…”, “it would be great if…”, but no one takes on the task or idea.
Result: Not much work gets done.
Commitments are meaningless. The company regularly throws out its goals, even at the quarterly level. Commitments to technical investments or cleanup after feature releases are overridden because of “other, more urgent priorities”. Follow-up work for incident reviews never gets done because teams are pulled into other tasks. Leaders have a track record of not delivering on their own commitments.
Result: Teams feel overwhelmed and frustrations pile up, leading to low morale and decreased commitment. Members of the organization notice that leaders don’t follow through on commitments, and wonder: “Why should I work hard to get stuff done, when leadership doesn’t care?”
Visibility of work is low. It’s hard to tell the status and progress of work. Managers spend a lot of time chasing tasks and following up with people and teams.
Result: Coordination overhead explodes. People feel micromanaged.
Poor and infrequent feedback. There’s no consistent feedback flow throughout the organization, from executives, to senior leaders, to individual contributors. Peers don’t give each other critical feedback. There’s a pattern of people inflating the positive impact of others’ work.
Result: Performance standards decrease, quality of outcomes decrease and fewer goals are achieved.
Turnover in the organization is very low. Depending on the company funding, stage, and size, between 4 and 20+% annual turnover can be expected. Mind you, this is only a symptom−I don’t think that you should force high turnover, or that forcing high attrition is a solution. But typically, if employees evolve while the organization stays relatively stable, at least some employees will outgrow it, e.g., because they have developed certain skills or are performing at a level that the company doesn’t need (engineers moving from senior to staff level is a frequent example of this). In growing and high-change organizations, roles, expectations, and context will change with every growth stage or iteration. This also means that employees either need to adapt to these new needs or leave if they don’t; if many employees stay despite high changes and there are performance issues, it’s usually a sign that there are no clear performance standards, poor feedback, and/or no performance management. By the way, that’s also why I’m always a bit skeptical when managers brag about having very high retention rates on their team: Retention itself isn’t always a positive sign.
Result: Performance standards decrease.
These aspects work together, so most of the time, when one is present, more of them are. Did you check off one or more of these signs as you were reading and reflecting on your own organization?
Congratulations, by identifying an accountability gap, you’ve taken the first step to addressing it! So let’s move onto the important part, how do you fix a broken accountability culture? I’m here to help.
Read the next article in the series: How to create accountability in your engineering organization, for practical steps on getting started.
