Joint Accountability: Another Key for Your Business Effectiveness

Written by admin on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009

I checked with my colleague Kurt, who was also a member of the search committee. He said to me, “Roger, you teach this stuff - you don’t have a choice.” He held me accountable for my views. More about this later.

Both of these stories focus on the Skilled Facilitator principle of joint accountability. Being accountable means you are responsible for addressing your problems with others directly with them rather than avoiding them or asking others to handle them for you.

Joint accountability also means that you share responsibility for a situation, including the consequences it creates. If you are working with others on a task, you are jointly accountable to each other for performing the task and the consequences of your joint actions. If things don’t work out as planned, rather than seek to blame others, you recognize that because you are part of a system, your actions contribute to either maintaining the system or changing it.

Chris Argyris’ research and our experience at Roger Schwarz & Associates tells me that though this kind of accountability feels risky, people get far better results when they consistently apply it.

In many organizations I work with, senior executives call for people to be accountable for the work they perform, but not for the relationships that create the work. This is particularly true about joint accountability between co-workers. When someone has a concern about a co-worker, rather than talk directly with the co-worker, they talk to others about the coworker. This approach often gets them results they find totally unacceptable - yet they continue to apply it!

That’s what was happening in my first story. My management faculty colleagues and I agreed that we would not allow colleagues to give feedback indirectly - we wanted more accountability.