Lack of Accountability- An invisible elephant in the room

 

“It is wrong and immoral to seek to escape the consequences of one's acts.”

(Mahatama Gandhi)

 

 

The dark grey sky was littered with glittering starts of all sizes, the faded  half- moon was hanging like a pale adornment from the horizon. While promenading within the secure wall of the residential campus I was  engrossed in a serious conversation with my fellow companion. He was a bit miffed with his trusted distant cousin for the non-completion of a critical task that led to some serious complication and trouble for him. Apparently, he seemed  deeply annoyed with the gentlemen he chose to trust. He concluded with the loud whining about the  lack of ownership  and accountability among the people in general.

 

I deal with the issues of responsibility and accountability on  a routine basis in my professional milieu, I quipped when his temper watered down a bit. I told him that despite investing years in the business organisations, I am still trying to discover the hormones that are responsible for inducing  sense of  accountability and ownership in the Individuals.

 

The cognitive revolution of the human beings  started  almost 70000 years back  but even today in the digital world of 21^st Century, a good number of the people around us in all walks of life have the innate tendency to avoid the ownership of the tasks befallen on their shoulders.

 

I came across an interesting study by Darren Overfield and Rob Kaiser published in Forbes magazine with the subject line “One Out of Every Two Managers Is Terrible at Accountability” that sums up the story of  corporate workplaces. The  study  of 5,400 upper-level managers revealed that the accountability was their single most neglected behaviour . It  also made a startling revelation stating, that a whopping 46% of the managers under study failed to demonstrate the mentioned behaviour during business transactions.

 

The crisis of the accountability at workplace is real, it’s like a big elephant dancing in the meeting rooms, invisible to the intelligent minds sitting over there to discover the reasons of failure and decline.

 

Culture of Accountability : What and Why ?

 

According to Cambridge dictionary, Accountability is  the fact of being responsible for what you do and able to give a satisfactory reason for it, or the degree to which this happens.

 

For me accountability refers to the ownership of the personal or organisational responsibility one has inherited or agreed to perform,  it encompasses the graceful acceptance of the setbacks and fiascos one may encounter in the mundane transactions of lives and of course,  it also includes the sharing of successes and accolades with fellow stakeholders.

 

According to the authors of the book” The Oz Principle: Getting Results Through Individual and Organizational Accountability”, True accountability is the “personal choice to rise above one’s circumstances and demonstrate the ownership necessary for achieving desired results.

The organisation’s performance and growth is inextricably linked with the culture of accountability permeating across the hierarchies of  work force.  The sense of accountability instils a feeling of belonging within the employee group leading to positive outcome and successful result. It creates a conducive environment where instances of failure is taken as an opportunity to own, reflect, learn and move forward with a positive intent. For start-ups, the accountability of the employees is the springboard to succeed and sustain by building a relationship of trust with the customers.

Developing the culture of accountability

It is no wonder that the corporate organisations are spending the huge sum of money and time to develop the culture of accountability within the organisation through various methods of training and employee engagement framework. Despite the continuous efforts of cultural transformation by the corporate office, the results are not very encouraging. The complexity of the issues  gets compounded for the start-ups as they may not have the luxury of necessary funds and time span required to implement a sustainable framework of employee engagement that may yield great result in the long term.  I strongly believe that the sense of responsibility and accountability is inculcated in the child from the pre-school stage itself, that may be further enhanced, fine-tuned  and reinforced with the aid of trainings, techniques and frameworks. The radical transformation in the attitude of the individual towards work and life  is a dauting task to accomplish for the harbingers of the initiatives within  a short tenure of the employee within the organisation.

 

It is not only  important to recruit the  “Best fit Talent”, it is equally important to create and implement the process of assessing the fitness for the role by measuring the performance of the individual against the core values  within 60 days from the date of joining. If the employees has failed to demonstrate the expected behaviours and is not aligned  with the organisation culture, s/he should be replaced immediately even if the process of replacement is painstaking and pricy. The impetus of driving the culture of accountability through open communication and environment of trust  lies squarely in the hands of leadership team.

 

Accountability is the glue that ties commitment to the result.

(Bob Proctor – Author, You Were Born Rich)

                                                                             

Reference :

https://hbr.org/2012/11/one-out-of-every-two-managers-is-terrible-at-accountability

The Dilemma of Friendship

 

               “Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life"

(Mark Twain)

                                                                                                          

Adrian was sitting alone in his dimly lit, small reading room  staring at the books he has collected over a protracted pattern of diverse seasons. In front of him, there were books  he has never read, he smelled, scanned, settled them smoothly on the wooden shelf for the future purposes. On the left corner, there were a few, he has abruptly left, after reading a few pages due to abundance of boredom and drabness effusing from the long prosaic paragraphs. He had his own likings for the books and authors, he read, relished and referred then again and again to explore and understand the various complexities of human lives and umpteen shades of human behaviour and emotions captured in the white pages. These books were like an old wine to him, he will pour, drink till he gets inebriated.

 

While turning the pages of the of one his favourite books randomly, he discovered a  handwritten note, he has referred this book on multiple occasions, but he could neither recall the timing of the scribbling nor could he correlate it with any purpose he might have thought about ,while putting it safe and secure within the pages of the book “The Difficult of Being Good”. The crumbed old note read as follows :

 

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle's best-known work on ethics, he described that friendship itself is a virtue, or involves virtue. It is not only important for living well, as a means, but is also a noble or beautiful end in itself that receives praise in its own right, and being a good friend is sometimes thought to be linked to being a good person. He differentiated into various categories based on the motives :

·      The pursuit of good

·      Utility or usefulness

·      Pleasure

According to him utility or pleasure are the inferior motives of the friendship. True friendship will be rare. When it does occur, it will only occur after a long period of time

 

His eyes got glued to the note, for him friendship was a conundrum that he could not resolve despite investing mammoth efforts and time. He was feeling betrayed by the recent events of his life, he thought that perhaps his gesture of friendship is being considered a sign of emotional weakness by the people around him. He wondered, not a long back he started his journey of friendship with Ashley with high hope and immense enthusiasm.  He remembered the cloudy winter evening, while sipping hot coffee they got into an accidental conversation about an uninteresting issue pertaining to collective behaviour of the society.During the prolonged conversation thanks to the continuous drizzle outside, they did discover a bit of commonalities in their thinking process that paved the way for them to meet again for the bitter caffeine and pleasant conversation.

 

He picked the paper in his hand and murmured, “perhaps Aristotle’ long time is longer than human life”. He needed an instant friendship that can make him cheerful and happy, needed a friend he can share his weird thoughts with. He wished to engage with someone to enjoy coffee and confabulation about mundane matters without irking other individual.

 

Ah, its not the right time for friendship!

 

In the “Dog eat Dog” world where all and sundry are racing against time, ultimately and ironically, only to be defeated by it – Aristotle’s long time needs to be recalibrated against the time keeper of the modern times. Adrian’s experience and expectations are not unique, it is much easier to find a friend in school with shared interest. You can find acquaintance, companion, colleague, comrade in the corporate corridors and happening cafes, but not necessarily a trusted friend driven by the “Pursuit of Goodness”.

 

The friends are lost during the journey from school to corporate world. Trace back your own path- you might have had many close and trusted buddies and besties in school and college, after spending a few critical years in the glittering corporate cosmos, perhaps you are left with a few that too if you have the luck of the Irish? It is indeed true that friendship is the first casualty after the watershed event of marriage as it changes the contours of relationship between couple and their friends upside down. The innocence of informality existing between friends fades with every passing day, paving the way for a decorated, formal, decent, perhaps a “nicely fit designer friendship” with rigidly defined boundaries.

 

 

Digitisation of  friendship

 

No one can disagree with the impact of digital connectivity to get into quick, crisp and cordial conversation leading to the strengthening of the bond of friendship. Digital revolution has changed the paradigm of friendship in many good and bad ways. It has significantly reduced the in-person interactions - the understanding of unspoken feelings, the warmth of the meetings, empathetic considerations, impatient wait to greet,  the innate giggle and guffaw seems to have lost the meaning in the world of meaningful discussions. In the upgraded version of friendship, we feel pleased to share the moments of glory and but feel hesitant to share the instances of pain. There is an invisible curtain between best of the friends that only allows the visibility of happy events and occurrences. Mostly, the meeting is between personalities, the persons are well hidden  behind their smartly crafted façade.

 

 

Friends are blessings

 

The Indian Telecom Giant “Airtel” ran an advertisement  campaign a few years back with a tagline “Har Ek Friend Zaroori Hota Hai”, to target the young and exuberant college going students. I believe that friends are crucial for all age groups to keep the spirit of vivacity and liveliness alive. You must have one true friend who can stand with you when the chips are down.

   It is indeed true that unlike Adrian, many of the aspiring professionals ready with parachute to jump into  the galaxy of excellence and exclusivity may not have necessary bandwidth  and even temperament to understand and accommodate the need for a true friend in life.

    The success requires blood, sweat and tears but once you get taste of it,  it induces many unique dilemmas. The person who accedes the summit always gets the advices he/she wishes to hear from the medley of acquaintances circling around him/her. This necessitates the need for a true friend who can share his /her displeasure and disapproval  without any fear of repercussion or  hope of favour. It reminds me of Oprah Winfrey’s interesting line  - “Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down.” 

 

 

Sustaining friendship

 

It is not easy to sustain a friendship, even if it has been nurtured and nourished over a long period of time due to plenty of  reasons emanating from the complexities of life.  More importantly if the value of true friendship in life  is not known,  once celebrated friendship  will reduce to functional association of strangers.

The discussion started with a silent conversation between Andrian and his books and  strayed desultorily into the strange territories of friendship. Let me invoke this beautiful couplet of Ghalib to close the chapter.

 

ye kahaa.n kii dostii hai ki bane hai.n dost naaseh

ko.ii chaarasaaz hotaa ko.ii Gam-gusaar hotaa

                                                            (Ghalib)

 

 

(Woe betide, my friendship, that the friends give pious advice and sermons they deliver.
I need someone on whose shoulders could I weep, who could allay my grief and my fears)