An interesting study about “single point accountability” was conducted in New York City in the 1970s.
The study involved a staged mugging. In this staged mugging the victim would yell out “someone call 9-1-1!” In this part of the study less than 50% of the people who heard the call actually dialed. The other part of the study involved the same mugging, but the victim would look directly at a bystander and say, “You call 9-1-1!” The results were amazing. Almost 100% of people complied!
This demonstrated that when individuals know that they are accountable, they will act. This happens daily in organizations, people are not acting because they don’t know they are the one that is accountable to do the task or activity. They don’t know they have permission to make the call.
Most organizations suffer from not knowing who is doing what. This causes redundancy, overlap, and tension in teams because members often wonder why others are completing their tasks. An Accountability Map develops a “single point accountability system” so everyone knows who is responsible for what and the individuals know what they are being held accountable to. This process reduces organizational tensions and clarifies ownership.
In the book “The Leadership Pipeline” by Ram Charan, Charan discusses how certain levels in the organization have distinct accountabilities. These accountabilities are the critical “kinks” in the talent pipeline that take many years to develop and master. This model shows that there are only 7 levels in the most complex organizations. In most organizations, it stops at the functional level.
Likewise, when defining a person’s role, there are 5 critical role attributes, they are:
- Accountabilities which are a group of similar work activities that are required by the role. For example: For a CEO, strategic planning requires a lot of activities that they must do to develop, maintain, and execute a company's strategic plan.
- Critical skills and behaviors are the requirements that the role has to perform to accomplish the accountability. Companies focus more on the skills, but they need to also focus on the behaviors because these are often the ones that cause peer, team, and company problems. We recommend that the behaviors are developed from the company's values and the individual must role model these behaviors to achieve the role requirements.
- Time spent is important because people will often spend too much or too little time on the activities they own, and this can get in the way of accomplishing their other accountabilities. For example: engineers may spend too much time on design vs. the implementation and training of the people who will be building the designs.
- Metrics drive behavior and when they are not clearly defined then people will perform the activities and get different results, or they won’t do them at all. So, metrics are a cornerstone for accountability.
- Lastly, authority and decision-making. We often try to hold people accountable, but we do not give them the “authority to act,” we simply don’t allow them to make decisions or have control over their role. For example: For a Procurement/Buyer we may hold them accountable for purchasing materials and parts to keep BOM’s up to date, but we don’t give them purchasing authority, which can cause delays. I’m not suggesting that a role like this should be able to purchase anything they want but if it is in a BOM that is standardized then give them the purchasing authority to do so!
Low performance has a direct correlation to not having clearly defined expectations and team members not knowing how they are measured.
Through an organizational mapping process, the current state organizational structure is examined to remove reporting and decision-making confusion. The Accountability Mapping process will then optimize the reporting structure for all employees, develop the key accountabilities for each leadership position and develop their individual performance metrics. It can also help with succession management, and career pathways. The outcome is a future state organizational structure that ensures no role overlap, confusion of expectations, and an optimized alignment to the organization’s business objectives.
Like a Value Stream Mapping process, the confusion, non-value-added management task, and misalignment to the company's business objectives are removed that cause barriers to performance and confusion. This alignment of people to metrics is the single most significant contributing factor to a company’s performance.
Need help establishing clear roles and responsibilities in your organization? We have proven processes that can help. Schedule a call with us to learn how we can support you in or send us an email at info@vereoimpact.com.
