Accountability First, Collaboration Second

Collaboration is one of the big buzz words of 21st century leadership. It’s almost as if we’ve had a huge awakening about the need for people to exchange ideas, and work together to achieve a common outcome.

I hate to be a Scrooge, but this is one of the core principles that underpins the theory of the firm: the whole rationale for creating companies is to bring together people with specialist expertise in a wide range of disciplines to maximize the value you create for your customers… so, in my head, the concept of collaboration in business is about 200 years old!

There are a lot of benefits to collaboration:

• Without it, there will be a lack of alignment between teams
• Opportunities to test ideas in a more holistic way will be lost
• Assumptions made in isolation will lead to snags, waste, rework, and complexity
• Internal competition increases and, as it does, so too does groupthink

Pushing people to collaborate solves many of these problems, which would otherwise be easily avoidable.

But, for me, the pendulum has swung too far in that direction.

If you seek to promote collaboration in everything you do, this can easily devolve into a very dangerous cultural phenomenon. Decision-making by consensus. I often say that decisions made by consensus, where everyone has to agree on the outcome, are the worst decisions possible.

Why? Because it drives you down to the lowest common denominator. You end up with a decision that everyone can sort-of live with, but no one is actually happy with – and you’d be hard-pressed to find a single individual who thinks it is the best decision that could have been taken.

This is when collaboration has morphed into appeasement. Instead of focusing on the best solution to the problem, you focus on how to best satisfy the people. Before you know it, you’re managing by committee in an all-care-no-responsibility culture… It’s performance Kryptonite for any organization, regardless of what industry or sector you operate in.

But we know that there are real benefits to collaboration, so how do we manage it? With strong, single-point accountability.

Through my years leading at executive level in large businesses, I learned that the number one thing to supercharge performance is to implement single-point accountability for every deliverable. It creates a totally different energy, and unlocks a level of commitment and dedication that you can’t otherwise create.

The accountable individual has to be charged with making all relevant decisions in relation to their deliverables. This is called empowerment.

But it doesn’t give them the right to act unilaterally, and ski off-piste. They have to be held accountable, not just for their decisions, but also the process they undertake to make sure they’re great decisions… and this requires collaboration. 

If you focus on collaboration first, you’ll end up with an all care no responsibility culture where results are poor. But if you put accountability first, and collaboration second, you’ll be able to unlock the best of both worlds.