A former colleague of mine (let’s call him Greg) grew increasingly frustrated with his stakeholders. As their finance partner, he was (in part) responsible for their financial performance, which had degraded over the years.

They underperformed on revenue, overspent on headcount, and consistently set deadlines they failed to meet. The team and Greg’s futures were linked, and given the state of affairs, the future was bleak.

Greg was convinced that things would turn around if only the team would be reprimanded strongly enough. He would wax poetic about the incoming Accountability Train before each business review. This mythical vehicle would whisk them off to a land where any misstep was summarily corrected. With each leadership transition, he would wait eagerly at the station for the Train to arrive. With every failed initiative, missed budget target, and stock price fluctuation, he would think, “The train’s coming!”

Someone — the CEO, CFO, or COO - would surely stop the madness when they would learn, yet again, that the dream they were sold was a nightmare. Someone would break the team’s embrace of Mehxcellence. Someone would stop the madness.

The Accountability Train never arrived. After months of waiting at the station, eager to hear the conductor yell, “All aboard!” Greg eventually gave up. He packed his bags and went to another company, hoping this one would be along the Train’s route.

I lost touch with Greg, but I suspect he found similar frustrations in his new company. Perhaps his new team was a little better about meeting goals and deadlines, but one way or another, we all learn that believing in something doesn’t make it real.

There’s no Santa Claus. There’s no Tooth Fairy. There’s no Accountability Train.

Accountability Isn’t the Problem

When things go wrong, we naturally look for the person responsible. Whether to blame or to solve, someone has to be held accountable.

On the face of it, this is reasonable. If there’s a leak in a bucket, refilling what was lost adds to the mess. Fix the leak or forever mop the floors. Fix performance by fixing the person. Simple.

The problem with this thinking is that we assume the problem is a people problem. Yes, people make mistakes. Yes, those mistakes can (and often do) lead to performance issues. But — and this is a huge BUT — we have to differentiate the source of the problem from where it arises. As we learned in Dig Where the Water Is, we can miss what’s obvious because we’re solving for what should be rather than what is.

Organizations are systems fueled by people. As W. Edward Deming said, “Every system is perfectly designed to get the result that it does.” So, when the people within a system consistently disappoint us, solving for the people doesn’t solve the underlying problem.

You don’t hold systems accountable — you redesign them.

Three Signs of a Systems Problem

There are three common causes of system issues that masquerade as accountability issues:

1. Lack of autonomy

2. Lack of clarity

3. Lack of resources

Lack of autonomy

When responsibilities are delegated, they are often done in such a way that teams feel responsible but powerless. Whether it's the CEO pushing down responsibility to teams below or a Manager pushing work to her directs, a sense of hesitancy often communicates to the delegates, “You do the work, but I call the shots.”

This creates a form of cultural learned helplessness, a psychological phenomenon whereby a person or animal is subjected to aversive stimuli (e.g., discomfort or failure) and finds that they have no control over the situation. Over time, they stop trying to avoid the stimuli or change the situation, even when opportunities to escape or change are presented.

One of the seminal experiments demonstrating learned helplessness was conducted by psychologists Martin Seligman and Steven F. Maier in 1967. They divided a set of dogs into three groups.

• The first group received electric shocks that they could end by pressing a lever.

• The second group received shocks of identical intensity and duration, but their levers did not stop the shocks. For these dogs, the situation was inescapable.

• The third group was a control group that was not subjected to shocks.

In the second phase of the experiment, the dogs were placed in a shuttlebox divided into two compartments by a low barrier. The floor on one side was electrified. The dogs could escape the shocks by jumping over the barrier to the non-electrified side.

The results showed that the dogs in the first and third groups quickly learned to jump over the barrier to escape the shocks. However, most of the dogs in the second group, which had previously experienced inescapable shocks, did not attempt to escape; they lay down passively, even though escape was now possible.

The second group of dogs had learned from their previous experience that they had no control over the shocks, and this belief persisted even when the situation changed to where they could have taken action to avoid the discomfort.

If you reflect on your own experiences, I suspect you could identify an instance where you saw this learned helplessness in your organization. It’s a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” type mentality, where there’s a lot of activity (typically at the behest of some central leader) without much progress. In those cases, would changing out the personnel make a difference? Unless it was the leader calling the shots sitting outside the organization held responsible, probably not.

Lack of Clarity

In Julie Zhuo’s The Making of a Manager, she drops this piece of (tough) advice:

If you’re like most people, you probably recoil at this statement. Come on, every major disappointment?

But, if you think about it, it makes sense. Most people don’t go to work daily, intent on disappointing those around them. Nobody aspires to be bad at their job. Some people get burned out and accept that they’ll do the bare minimum, but even the bare minimum is anchored in some expectations. The question is, whose expectations are we anchoring to?

In our personal and professional lives, we are terrible at communicating what we want. We’ve talked about the Curse of Knowledge - the idea that what we take for granted is entirely foreign to those around us.

Until we confidently say we’ve communicated what’s expected - deliver what by when - holding anyone but ourselves accountable is equivalent to blaming someone else for not knowing the song we’re tapping.

Lack of Resources

Tony Robbins said, “It's not the lack of resources; it's your lack of resourcefulness that stops you.” Well, sort of.

In the Year of Efficiency, we've seen several companies have too many resources, but that’s one extreme on the spectrum. The other side is being made responsible for accomplishing a task without being given access to the tools required to achieve it.

If I ask you to clean my house, it’s fair for me to expect that you come with some of your tools. It’s probably also fair for me to expect that I shouldn’t have to tell you to sweep under the kitchen table or move the jacket off the floor if it’s in the way of your vacuuming. But I should probably give you a way to enter my house in the first place and provide you with access to the electrical outlets to plug in your vacuum, no?

A lack of resources to get the job done is particularly poignant when someone is responsible for delivering a goal that requires cross-functional support. A new product launch requires engineers to build it, marketing to create compelling copy to sell it, and customer support to be prepared to answer questions as they come in. How can the product leader enact a successful launch if they cannot encourage those teams to prioritize their task?

As discussed in Tacos vs. Burritos, we are good at defining the ingredients needed and pretty bad at ensuring we have the right recipe. Just because you put a bunch of people on a cross-functional team and appoint one of them as a leader doesn’t mean the team will collaborate cross-functionally. They’ll need help — a lot of help — to establish this new working protocol.

I want to be clear - accountability is an essential and effective tool for management to maintain momentum. We need to hold ourselves and be held accountable…when the situation calls for it.

The point I’m making here is that accountability only works when those responsible are given the authority to make decisions, the clarity on the goals, and the resources to deliver what was asked of them. Attempting to hold someone accountable when they had no chance at success is about as effective as teaching a snake to catch a ball. It isn’t happening.

So, how do we position ourselves for a culture of accountability? Much like a train needs tracks, the Accountability Train requires a culture of ownership.

Oh, another vehicle metaphor…

All Aboard the OwnerSHIP

I firmly believe that we overestimate the effect leadership can have and underestimate our own.

Good luck to people like Greg, waiting for someone else to take charge and make someone do something. The reality is that no one can make anyone do anything. We can pressure, shame, or punish — but those are pretty blunt tools in the leadership toolbelt. The more effective tool — the one most leaders leverage — is influence. And influence takes time and scale to be effective.

Whether you’re an executive, a manager, or a member of one of these teams — you have power! You can make a change. You have to own it.

How? Well, look at the requirements needed for accountability.

• If you see a lack of autonomy, call it out. Often, folks don’t appreciate the power dynamics at play. When I was a junior finance professional partnering with my stakeholders, I highlighted when the leader asked a subordinate to do something without providing the proper autonomy to do so. It’s simple but effective.

• If you lack clarity, use questions to fill in those gaps. What does success look like? How will improving X metric impact the overall results? When you say you want to see “incremental” sales, what does that mean to you? The Curse of Knowledge is a two-way street - neither side can hear the notes underneath the other side’s tapping. If you aren’t sure, in all likelihood, nobody is.

• If you see a lack of resources, ask for more. The first question I ask when I’m partnered with a new cross-functional team is, “How will this team act on its decisions.” It is deceptively simple — and no one ever knows the answer right away. Once we start talking it out, we begin to see the complications of how the team’s decisions could upend each functional representative’s prioritization, and that’s where the meaty conversation begins. Underneath all of this is the need to accept trade-offs — by coming together, we are going to do some things for the betterment of the group, even if it means some of us are going to forego priorities that are important to us individually. It’s tough, but the hard things are the things worth doing.

If you noticed the underlying theme of “communication” in these answers, good. That’s the answer. Ownership is, first and foremost, a communication skill. It’s the ability to articulate and agree upon what matters, what we’ll do about it, and what happens if we don’t do it successfully.

The best part of these ownership behaviors is that they’re contagious. As we each start to appreciate our power in enacting change, we teach others that they, too, have power.

In short, accountability is a top-down way of enforcing commitments. Ownership is a bottoms-up way of building commitment to our obligations.

So, if you’re ready, grab your oar — it’s time to set sail.