WorkWise: The good and the bad of accountability

Mildred L. Culp

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The workplace thrives on accountability. Being accountable means being responsible for what you say and do, regardless of the consequences. You can tell that a company doesn't foster accountability when someone is blamed for a problem and no one, the perpetrator or anyone else, attempts to correct it.

Jeffrey Ford, associate professor of Management at Fisher College of Business at The Ohio State University in Columbus, maintains that you can tell if your culture nurtures accountability if managers:

make specific requests with true deadlines;

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promise resources, introductions, interventions or a lightened workload;

consult with employees about project status at deadline;

openly admit their errors, with apologies;

recognize earnest employee contributions, even when an assignment couldn't be completed; and

discuss "what has been learned, what to continue and what to change" after project completion.

Some people are willing to be accountable. Debra Yergen, executive coach at DY&Co in Yakima, Wash., felt that something she did might have contributed to losing a part-time job.

"I worked for a company with a no-gossiping rule," she says. "After talking to my boss about something that bothered me, being told 'a decision had been made' and being warned not to discuss it with anyone else to avoid disruption in the department, I talked to a co-worker."

Her grumbling about a management problem was overheard and transmitted to her boss. Apologizing, she took responsibility for her actions.

A year later, her job was axed. She suspects that the gossiping was a contributing factor, but she'll never know. She did conclude "that there are consequences for bad decisions."

Lisa Lockwood, a Chicago-based public speaker on reinvention, was a rookie police officer so excited about nabbing a speeder that a confidential document flew out of her passenger window.

Open fields surrounded her; so she thought she'd write up the driver and hunt for the document later. She radioed a colleague for help, only to learn that her carelessness might earn her a suspension.

"I radioed the shift sergeant and asked to meet him in the station," she recalls. " I said, 'I have no excuse for my carelessness.' He looked perplexed, as if it were the first time he'd heard a police officer not make an excuse."

She documented the incident and received a written reprimand.

Both Yergen and Lockwood were rewarded for holding themselves accountable. Yergen became a freelance contractor at the same company with as many hours as she'd worked part-time there. When the sergeant was promoted, he saw to it that Lockwood was promoted to detective.

One less tangible reward for accountability comes from Talia Witkowski of Heal Your Hunger in Los Angeles. To her, it's personal satisfaction: "the way I get to feel about myself at the end of the day."

What's the alternative to being accountable -- less work, fewer fix-ups, a chance to get away with something?

It could mean keeping a job in a bad workplace. Attorney Jean Donhanyos of Royal Oak, Mich., found that her accountability wasn't appreciated any more than her attempt to make others accountable when she served as a referee in a court hearing juvenile delinquency and child protection proceedings. Her meticulous work, designed to reduce repeat offenses, caused friction among colleagues who wanted to rush through cases.

"My standards ... offended them," she says. "The supervisory staff just looked at whether you moved the files. Judges were allowing prosecutors to determine the outcome of cases." She says that the department fell far short of its ethical obligations.

Donhanyos paid dearly for meeting her own ethical obligations. Intimidation, embarrassment and refusal to respect probable cause confronted her daily. Worse than that, she suspects, for not playing by the "rules," she ended up being fired. Dr. Mildred L. Culp welcomes your questions at culp@workwise.net.