Epic Fails – All Care, No Responsibility

Collaboration is a critical ingredient for working successfully in complex organizations. But you should never sacrifice accountability in order to increase collaboration.

When you don’t structure your team’s work program around single-point accountability, it’s hard to know who’s really doing what. 

Accountabilities become more opaque, confused, and misunderstood… and performance suffers accordingly.

From low-level, part-time job sharing… to co-CEOs of major global businesses, we witness the hazards of trying to share accountabilities. Humans just aren’t particularly good at it, for all sorts of reasons.

The concept of job-sharing is a good place to start. 

Theoretically, accountability rests with the role, not the individual, so it should be pretty easy to execute a job sharing arrangement successfully, right? It’s a  single role where the accountability lies with whichever individual happens to be performing it on any given day.

But even this level of split accountability has its issues:

• For a start, the two people have to ultimately agree on any decisions
• Failing that, the more dominant person would simply get their way
• And everyone else works out pretty quickly how to play mum off against dad. By that, I mean that people start thinking, “I need an answer on this issue, but Em’s a hard-arse, so I’ll wait until Thursday, because Marty will be in the role then, and I’ve got a better chance of convincing him.”

Even with clearly-allocated accountabilities, it still requires a level of consensus.

It also weakens performance standards… just think about the practicalities of working out who is performing and who isn’t?

• When an awesome result is achieved by the two people in a shared role, you’d have to wonder, “Did one of those individuals get a free-ride?”
• And when a disaster occurs, you’d have to wonder “Where did the breakdown occur?”

And that’s just managing accountabilities with two people in the same role… So, you can imagine how confusing it is to split accountabilities between multiple roles.

Most of the epic fails I witnessed during my corporate executive career were as a direct consequence of unclear or shared accountabilities. 

Whenever you try to split the accountability for delivery of an outcome to more than one person, gaps and overlaps begin to form.

It’s an inevitable consequence of shared accountability… but the difference in attitude, energy, and culture when accountabilities are shared is even more damaging,

People get into a very relaxed mindset. They may work diligently, and they may work hard… and they may even give you what they think is their best effort.

But there will always be that little voice in their head saying, “This issue is someone else’s problem.”

You need one head to pat, and one arse to kick… when someone feels individually accountable, their energy changes… they become more focused, and more diligent.

When something goes wrong, there’s a natural sense of urgency to either resolve it quickly, or escalate the issue to you so that they can seek your guidance. That drives a better tempo, too!

Single point accountability demands that there is one and only one name next to every major outcome that needs to be achieved. And when you manage those accountabilities, it lays the foundation for building a “no blame / no excuses” culture.

If you just want your people to be able to come to work, feel good about contributing in a team environment, and do the things they’re comfortable with, then shared accountabilities are just the ticket.

But, if it’s performance you’re after, you won’t find it by spreading the accountability for outcomes across multiple people.