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This entire article serves to describe and detail the effectiveness of implementing a philosophy of shared leadership involving the practices of accountability, ownership, empowerment and communication.

Accountability

Accountability: having the responsibility and authority to act and fully accepting the natural and logical consequences for the results of those actions.

In a team based organization, accountability is focused at the team rather than the individual level. This means that the members of the team feel mutually accountable to each other and that the team as a whole, not any one or two individuals within it, accepts accountability for the results of the team’s actions.

Accountability is an odd thing. Many workers do their best to avoid it because it has often been used as ammunition for blame or punishment. The truth is that accountability is unavoidable. In the workplace everyone is accountable to someone. In a traditional organization workers are individually accountable to their bosses. In a high performance organization team members are individually accountable to each other and mutually accountable to their customers. But rather than a negative force, research indicates that holding people accountable for their results has very positive effects: greater accuracy of work, better response to role obligations, more vigilant problem solving, better decision making, more cooperation with co-workers, and higher team satisfaction ­ in short, higher overall performance.

The paradigm of individual accountability is so strong in our organizational cultures that the notion of holding a whole team accountable for its collective outputs boggles corporate minds. But is it really so hard? Sorting out the contributions of an individual can be a tricky task. How can I tell what your part in the product was? Where a team produces a whole piece of work, output is much easier to assess.

And what should we care, after all, what part each individual played in making it happen. If your dry cleaners ruins one of your suits, do you hunt down the worker who did the damage? No, you hold the whole business accountable for making the situation right. You don’t care who made the mistake or even who will fix it, just as long as the problem is resolved. So it should be with your teams. Truly empowered teams have the authority to carry out their responsibilities as well as the accountability for collectively fixing things when they go wrong.

Making the shift from an environment of individual accountability to team accountability will take some effort. But it may not be as difficult as you imagine. Many people think that accountability is an attitude and as such is extremely hard to affect. In reality, accountability can be strongly influenced by two aspects of an organization: its systems and its culture. Making the right changes to both of these can help instill the appropriate sense of accountability that most organizations desire.

To be effective at fostering team accountability and ownership, an organization’s systems must be designed with three basic principles in mind.

• Focus: Teams must have a clear, shared focus and explicit expectations
• Influence: Team members must have influence over both their work processes as well as the people with whom they are interdependent
• Consequences: There should be natural and logical consequences for all actions

FOCUS: Systems for accountability begin with a clear focus and expectations. In a team setting, teams need to share a clear mission statement that links directly to the organization’s vision. Building on that mission statement a team should identify its collective outputs and devise systems for measuring their success at efficiently delivering quality products or services. Within the team, each member should be clear of his/her roles and responsibilities including agreements on individual expectations and standards of excellence.

INFLUENCE: Teams will also need to be able to influence the operations of these systems. This means they need to be given as much authority as is reasonable to determine how they achieve the outcomes they have committed to. As Stephen Covey says, “You can’t hold people accountable for results if you manage their methods.”

Similarly team members need to have influence over those with whom they are interdependent. Holding teams jointly accountable for their combined results will only work if the people within the team can influence each other’s behavior. Ideally this implies team members have what we call “gate control” ­ control over who joins the team and who stays on the team. At the very least systems need to be devised such that a team member’s feedback carries as much weight as a manager’s feedback. This can be affected by instituting a team review process or at least by redesigning your performance appraisal system to include input from customers and team mates.

CONSEQUENCES: Lastly, an organization’s systems need to close the loop by connecting real consequences to a team’s actions. Too often managers shield teams from the consequences of what they do ­ they field complaints from customers or run interference with other departments. If a team is to be held accountable, then they must handle the results of their own actions together and either suffer or enjoy the natural consequences. This usually means putting teams in direct and regular contact with their customers, and linking at least a portion of their compensation with their cumulative efforts. It also means that the whole team is held accountable for the performance of each member. In a team based organization, coaching and correcting individual performance problems is as much a team responsibility as a management responsibility.

This article has six (6) parts in its entirety. Part three (3) of this article is entitled “Managing Everybody Else: Shared Leadership – Empowerment”

Image by Felix42 contra la censura via Flickr