The word accountability is all over the place these days - several companies were doing some "creative accounting" making multi-million dollar frauds to their stockholders.
What is accountability? How can you hold somebody accountable for something?
The first question is what is the difference between accountability and responsibility. Many people confuse these words. I am going to present you my model of accountability which we at the Adizes Institute use in our consulting work with clients.
The system of accountability consists of three subsystems: responsibility (task), authorance (authority, power, influence), and rewards. A person is accountable if he knows his task, has the sufficient authority/power/influence to carry out the task and gets the expected rewards. If all people are accountable, the organization will perform better than if otherwise.
For all their differences, the four mismanagement styles, (P---), (-A--), (--E-), and (---I), have one trait in common: They are all inflexible stereotypes. The managers who exhibit these styles have uni-dimensional, one-track minds. They have only a limited perception of who they are and of what they are supposed to do in life. They are not well-rounded individuals.
Anyone who exhibits an exclusive, single-role management style is in danger of becoming Deadwood, a fanatic, or a martyr. Each of the previous styles of mismanagement were three quarters deadwood (P---),(-A--),(--E-) and (---I).
During the Adolescent stage of the organizational lifecycle, companies are reborn. The transition from Courtship to Infancy is comparable to physical birth. In Adolescence it's an emotional rebirth: companies find life apart from their founder or from any management that behaves like a founder. In many ways, the company is like a teenager trying to establish independence from family - any family.
Why is the transition from Go-Go to Adolescence so difficult? There are three principal challenges:
* Delegation of authority
* Change of leadership
* Goal displacement
In order to predict whether or not a decision will be implemented, certain factors must be analyzed. First, you cannot implement a decision that's not well-defined. If the decision is ambiguous, it's not going to be implemented the way you want. You cannot have an almost well-defined decision. It's either well-defined or it isn't. A well-defined decision is one that fulfills the four imperatives of decision making. They are the imperatives corresponding to the (PAEI) roles. Fulfilling them gives you a (PAEI) decision.
The (PAEI) imperatives are the first factors that predict implementation, but not the only ones. We also need "managerial energy" to carry the decision through. Often we know what needs to be done, but we can't carry it out without authority, power, influence, or any combination of these three.