informal coalitions

Reframing accountability in organizational practice

 

Naomi Stanford is widely-known for her insightful writing on organization design. In a recent LinkedIn post, she has questioned the ways in which accountability is understood and applied in an organizational context. This challenge is long overdue. I strongly agree with her that this taken-for-granted aspect of conventional management practice is in urgent need of a rethink.

At the same time, I would base my argument on a different issue from those that she has identified.

Ready… Blame… Fire!

Too often, the term “accountability” is used as a synonym for blame. It serves as a label to hang around the necks of ‘the guilty’ when things appear to have ‘gone wrong’. This does little to encourage people to comment candidly on their own practice and performance. Or to enable them, individually and collectively, to work to improve what’s going on. Most importantly, though, it completely ignores the complex social reality of organization, through which ‘outcomes’ emerge in practice.

Public sector pay review - Off target

The government-commissioned Fair Pay Review, was published earlier today. Led by the Work Foundation's Will Hutton, the review team recommend a new performance-related pay deal for senior executives that might eventually be extended to middle managers.  The proposals include a suggestion that managers should have to "earn back" a proportion of their pay (say 10-15% of it) by meeting personal performance targets. Provision would then exist for "excellent performers" to earn an additional, bonus sum.

According to an article in HRZone, Hutton maintains that no pay system can be fair if it fails to reflect individual performance.  And there's the rub. The whole pay-for-performance approach - whether in the public or private sector - rests on the proposition that organizational outcomes can be related, in a simple cause-and-effect way, to the 'performance' of individuals.  They can't.

A common sense approach?

It might seem like common sense to pay people according to their perceived performance.  But it is a version of common sense which still sees the business world as ordered, predictable and ultimately controllable.  So where is the flaw in this widely used practice?  And is there an alternative?