Organizational Accountability – Evaluating Organizational Culture, part 2

StrategyDriven Organizational Accountability ArticleAn organization’s culture – its commonly shared values and beliefs – is both highly complex and interrelated. As such, no one cultural artifact should be used in isolation to describe an organization’s culture and each artifact contributes differently to the painting of the overall culture picture. Objectively viewing the collection of cultural artifacts and identifying their individual contribution significance is critically important to developing an accurate understanding of the organization’s culture.


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About the Author

Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven Principal is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.

Take the Fear Out of Accountability

The word accountability elicits a threat response from most employees, who interpret the word ‘accountability’ to be synonymous with punishment. Let’s face it, any time there’s a disaster, mistake, or misfortune on the news, the first thing out of the mouth of the officials is, “Who is to be held accountable?” The tone is always one of shame and blame and fingers always start to point before facts are given. Employees at any level of the hierarchy will avoid the pain of blame and punishment if the culture is one which people fear accountability instead of seek accountability to get the intended results.

You can’t blame them, really, for having this kind of visceral recoil from the word, if that’s all it means to them.

But, I believe that that it’s possible to take the fear out of accountability so that your people actually crave accountability rather than cringe when they hear the word.

Here are three ways to go about doing that:


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About the Author

Marlene ChismMarlene Chism is a consultant, international speaker, and the author of two books: No-Drama Leadership: How Enlightened Leaders Transform Culture in the Workplace (Bibliomotion 2015) and Stop Workplace Drama (Wiley 2011). Marlene’s passion is developing wise leaders and helping people discover, develop, and deliver their gifts to the world.

Organizational Accountability Warning Flag 4 – Taking Care of Employees

StrategyDriven Organizational Accountability Warning Flag ArticleAt first glance, warning against taking care of one’s employees appears contradictory to what most would believe is an important function of every manager. Context is important here. Too often, managers ‘take care of their employees’ during the performance review process.


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Organizational Accountability Warning Flag 3 – Artificial Retainer Driven Complacency

StrategyDriven Organizational Accountability Warning Flag Article“The wheel that does the squeaking is the one that gets the grease.”

Josh Billings (1818 – 1885)
American humorist

It’s a natural human tendency to seek the path of least resistance. For executives, managers, and supervisors, this practice translates into assigning the difficult and emergent work activities to top performers, diverting work away from under-performers, and avoiding employee confrontations. The latter action erodes accountability. Leaders who do not address the shortcomings of under-performers including the provision of overly positive (even if neutral) feedback and unearned rewards (relative to top performers) loudly proclaim the merits of non-performance. Continued high performance and retention of top talent reinforces these errant practices until one day the lack of accountability drives the company’s best employees to a competitor’s business.


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Additional Information

Additional information regarding artificial employment restraints and how individuals can overcome them is contained within the StrategyDriven Professional Development article, Artificial Employment Restraints.

Corporate Cultures – Why Policies Don’t Match Actions

Policy - Action MismatchToo often, corporate policies are the ‘little white lies’ no one likes to talk about. Philosophically, corporate policies should reflect the expectations of company leaders and drive management’s decisions and employee actions. Upon closer examination, however, management’s decisions and employee actions are anything but aligned with documented expectations; with few seemingly concerned about the discrepancy.


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