How is accountability defined in your organization? When you hear someone talking about accountability, are you afraid it might be applied to you? Accountability is defined as “the quality or state of being accountable; and obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or to account for one’s actions”. The dictionary also states that responsible is a synonym for accountable. Simply stated, accountability is neither positive nor negative, but for some reason, most people in organizations feel that there is a negative connotation to accountability. We usually hear the phrase “who is accountable for x?” when something has gone wrong and we are ready to pronounce blame on someone. I usually don’t hear someone asking who was responsible for achieving a great result.

Some of the best work that I have seen published on accountability comes from a book “The Oz Principle” by Roger Connors and Tom Smith. I would highly recommend reading and applying these principles in your life and organization. Accountability should be applied when people do a good job and also when their work is in question. When applying Performance Management, we follow these three easy steps:

• Clear define your expectations, whenever possible in writing
• Follow though on your expectations
• Hold people accountable for the results, good and bad

Both good and bad, both positive and negative, in other words people want to know how they are doing. Roger D’Aprix reported that from his research employees wanted the following information from their employers, these are listed by importance to the employee:

1. What is my job?
2. How am I doing?
3. Does anybody care?
4. How are we doing?
5. Where does my team fit in?
6. How can I help?

Accountability is part of all six of these types of communications, people want to know what the expectations are and how they are performing. How well do you do? There may some inherent strengths and opportunities that we may want to acknowledge based upon our Core Motives.

Let’s explore a few. Here is my caveat, these are my own observations and thoughts and may not reflect the work of Dr Hartman.

REDS

As I work with REDS and their ability to hold themselves and other accountable I have seen some interesting dynamics. I don’t usually see this group struggling with enforcing necessary rules, policies, and regulations. For a RED, the rules are the rules, if not we would call them suggestions. So rules are enforced. What a RED needs to be cognizant of is how they do it. Sometimes, (speaking as a recovering RED), I find that I am not as empathetic as I could or should be. Not that I don’t believe that this is important behavior – I just don’t always think about it. This has been a life-long endeavor for me to learn this type of behavior, and use it. I am fairly sure I am not the only RED that works on being more empathetic. I have learned a lot from my BLUE friends, they seem to be quite natural at this.

BLUES

BLUES usually have the empathy part of management down, they seems to always be aware of how people are feeling and how what they do affects other people. When they hold others accountable they do it right. However, there seems to be a conflict with letting empathy stand in the way of accountability. Over the years I have found that as I have coached a BLUE in leadership we have found it helpful to come up with systems, processes, and routines to help them hold themselves and others accountable. It helps to manage a process, these seems to take the emotion out of the equation. Now it is just about managing tasks. Something our BLUES do extremely well and in a very qualitative and detailed manner.

WHITES

Whites do a good job or holding themselves accountable and can do a great job of holding others accountable if they have learned to allow themselves to be involved with a little conflict. At times, accountability will involve some conflict. If you shy away from conflict in order to achieve “peace”, it may produce the unintended consequence of conflict. This can be a learned behavior, and most of us don’t look forward to conflict, but have learned to deal with it as it arises. Whites can also pick up this trait from observing and emulating others, but this tends to be their Achilles heel.

YELLOWS

Sometimes accountability is not fun. That becomes the nemesis of a Yellow leader. There are other things or tendencies that would be preferable. Yet when focused on accountability, and their naturally charismatic way, a yellow can be quite good at holding others accountable. They may struggle more with holding themselves accountable. That can be less noticeable that when dealing with others and their success. A Yellow may feel more an obligation to hold someone else accountable. Accountability for good work is much more fun, therefore, a Yellow will have some fun with this type of positive recognition. Correcting performance can be a different story.

Conclusion

So when you look at accountability and Core Motive it would appear that each color has attributes that can help them hold themselves and others accountable and each color has limitations that can provide obstacles with accountability. One question that I use with leaders as they work to create a culture of accountability is this: “Do you have a rule book that needs to be adhered to for yourself and others or do you have a list of suggestions. Each leader is free to make whatever choice that they would like to make, however, you cannot choose the consequences of your actions.”

It is your choice, make it a good one!