The concept of accountability is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it drives results that would not be achieved if nobody ‘owned’ the outcome. On the other hand, accountability can do a lot of damage when things go wrong and efforts are made to hold someone accountable. Most of us don’t believe it’s our fault and almost always, the root cause is complex.
For this reason, we spend a huge amount of energy in our corporate life obfuscating accountability when things haven’t worked out as expected. The problem with this is that it’s almost impossible to get to the root cause of an operating problem, because there is a lack of transparency…
