Accountability as a Corporate Value
My experience, and observation with clients, is that accountability doesn't work particularly well as a corporate value. The principle reason is that it is an attribute of accusation. If I were to sit you down and open our conversation with "I need to talk to you about something your accountable for.", would your internal response be positive or negative? Similarly, if you were to observe a person of higher status on the corporate ladder clearly engaged in a behavior that was contrary to the interests of the business, but not illegal, how likely are you to confront them directly and hold them accountable for the transgression? In many cases, that's likely to be a career limiting move.
There is a reason no one gives awards for accountability. Human nature is such that most people don't want to be held accountable. It carries the inference of shouldering the blame for something when it goes wrong. Credit is what we get when things go right. People do, however, want others to be held accountable. It's a badge worn by scapegoats and fall guys. Consequently, accountability as a corporate value tends to elicit blame behavior and, in several extreme cases I've observed, outright vindictiveness. The feet of others are held to the accountability fire with impunity in the name of upholding the enshrined corporate value.
Another limitation to accountability as a corporate value is that it implies a finality to prior events and a reckoning of behaviors that somehow need to balance. What's done is done. Time now to visit the bottom line, determine winners and losers, good and bad. Human performance within any business isn't so easily measured. And this is certainly no way to inspire improvement.
So overall, then, a corporate value of accountability is a negative value, like the Sword of Damocles, something to make sure never hangs over your own head.
Yet, in virtually every case, I can recognize the positive intention behind accountability as a corporate value. What I think most organizations are going after is more in line with the ability to recognize when something could have been done better. To that end, a value of 'response ability" would serve better; the complete package of being able to recognize a failure, learn from the experience, and respond in a way that builds toward success. On the occasions I've observed individuals behaving in this manner repeatedly and consistently, the idea of "accountability" is near meaningless. The inevitable successes have as their foundation all the previous failures. That's how the math of superior human performance is calculated.
Image by Chris Pastrick from Pixabay