When Responsibility and Accountability are Confused

White tangle of roads.

Responsibility and accountability are often misunderstood in the workplace. Responsibility is at the individual-level, no matter what your job is. It’s personal. Accountability is a bit tricky. Your supervisor, manager, director, vice president, president, and board, are each accountable to the level above for all that we and they do, with the board accountable to the stockholders and stakeholders. But guess what…employees are stakeholders, customers are stakeholders, and communities are too! Whaat? Yep. Dang. So accountability is personal, too. Organizations are also accountable to me and you.

This is really what drives my transformation adventure. Decades as an organizational strategy consultant have shown me that it is our personal blind spots (aka “crap”) that keep us from getting organizational responsibility and accountability right. My crap keeps me from understanding yours, which keeps us from seeing ours, which keeps us from seeing everybody’s crap. And here we are. What do we do about it? We each take responsibility AND accountability, regardless of our “authority”. Really? It’s scary. Oh yeah, it is. But it’s even more frightening when you don’t because sometimes nobody does. But you know that. You’ve been living it. Don’t get me wrong, though; I don’t’ believe in disorder, I just can’t condone miss-order. There is a kind and thoughtful way to do everything when “pleasing” is off the table and truth matters.

My transformation adventure is about facing how I’ve fallen into organizational misbehavior with my best intentions, and yours in mind too. I know how easy it is. I eventually figured out how to surround myself with truth-tellers, but there are too few out there to turn the tide…yet. Join the adventure and I’ll show you how.

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