A Wall Street Journal article, “Urban Trauma Mitigates Guilt, De- fenders Say,” reports that “Lawyers defending inner-city criminals are honing a new and startling psychiatric defense: that their clients suffer from an ‘urban psychosis’ that reduces their responsibility for their crimes. The lawyers argue that day-to-day urban life can induce post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition courts already have recog-
nized in Vietnam veterans, rape victims and battered spouses and children. Some defense lawyers are asking courts to take this condition into account when they determine the guilt and punishment of inner- city residents.” Even if you believe “urban psychosis” should mitigate a person’s guilt, the argument makes it all too easy to mask respons- ibility people should accept for how they respond to their environ- ments and circumstances. People do play a role in their circumstances and environments, and they share joint accountability for what hap- pens in their neighborhoods and on their streets. Unfortunately, the process of defining joint accountability has gone to exacting extremes as lawyers and litigants spend countless hours and dollars trying to determine who’s at fault. Luckily, the article goes on to say, “Many legal and psychological experts are skeptical about whether urban psychosis even exists…. ‘Pretty soon we’re going to have to sweep in everybody because they’re born, sufferers from post-traumatic stress disorder,’ said Karil S. Klinbeil, a professor of social work and psycho- logy at the University of Washington, who frequently testifies about battered-woman, battered-child and battered-person syndromes. ‘It’s getting out of control.’” According to another expert, Bruce Fein, a constitutional scholar and attorney, “We have a whole raft of lawyers today arguing that individuals are just helpless over their circum- stances and don’t have a choice over their destiny. That’s nonsense.”
Unchecked, such nonsense will continue to erode America’s compet- itiveness in the world and drain its people of any sense of individual or joint accountability for better results. That would be tragic.
An important aspect of The Oz Principle’s definition of accountab- ility involves the fact that accountability works best when people share ownership for circumstances and results. The old definition of accountability leads people to assign “individual responsibility,”
without acknowledging the shared accountability that so often char- acterizes organizational behavior and modern life. Not surprisingly, whenever a single individual is identified as the one responsible for poor results, everyone else breathes a sigh of relief now that they’re
“off the hook.” Assigning singular responsibility may comfort the majority, but the fact remains, organizational results come from col- lective, not individual, activity. Hence, when an organization fails to perform well, it’s a collective or shared failure. A complete understand- ing of accountability in organizations must begin with an acceptance of the notion of “joint accountability.”
Imagine a baseball team where each defensive player assumes re- sponsibility for covering an area of the field. No hard-and-fast rules prescribe the exact point where one player’s area ends and another’s begins. Given such overlapping areas of responsibility, getting good results (i.e., covering the whole field) becomes a team effort wherein individual accountability shifts according to circumstances, and players are always trained to go for the ball, whenever they can reach it, even when more than one player can do so. For example, you have probably observed the occasion when a ball is popped up into shallow left-center field. Immediately, the short-stop, the left fielder, and the center fielder converge at the same time with none of them completely sure of who should catch the ball. Sometimes, the ball gets dropped because the players run into one another or, thinking it could be anyone’s ball, they all wait for the other guy to make the catch - uncertain as to who is going to take responsibility for it this time. In many ways, the organizational game is a “team sport” where everyone has his or her individual responsibility, where everyone contributes to the final score, and where joint accountability governs play.
One company president characterized what joint accountability meant to him: “everyone working together so that we don’t drop the ball; but when it does get dropped, everyone dives for the ball to pick it up.” “Unfortunately,” he said, “too many of our people see the ball falling to the ground between players but react by saying ‘that was your ball.’” In most organizations it would be easy to recount a litany of projects in which someone had missed a critical deadline, incurred an unexpected expense, quit in the middle of a job or failed to pay attention to a crucial detail. In such cases, no one jumps in to pick up the dropped ball. Everyone just sits smugly on the sideline, saying,
“Well, Bob [or Sue] really messed things up this time.” How account- ability works individually and in organizations is illustrated with the circles below.
When people look at their accountability to the organization they usually view it strictly in terms of their own individual responsibility.
As a result, things tend to fall through the cracks because they fall outside of the boundaries they have drawn around independent aspects of their job. Often, organizations try to fix this problem by redefining roles, hiring more people (thus filling in the cracks by adding more circles), or restructuring the organization. However, when people view their accountability as something larger than their responsibility, people find themselves feeling accountable for things beyond what a literal interpretation of their job description might suggest (i.e., profits, customer complaints, sharing information, project deadlines, effective communications, sales, and the success of the overall com- pany). When people assume this attitude of joint accountability for all aspects of a project, the cracks or boundaries disappear, and people then see it as their responsibility to make sure the ball is not dropped.
In their instructive account of Jack Welch’s transformation of General Electric, Control Your Destiny or Someone Else Will, authors Noel Tichy and Stratford Sherman conclude with a chapter wherein Jack Welch himself speaks his mind about GE’s future and its need for more joint accountability or “boundarylessness,” as he calls it: “If this company is to achieve its goals, we’ve all got to become bound- aryless. Boundaries are crazy. The union is just another boundary, and you have to reach across the same way you want to reach across the boundaries separating you from your customers and your suppliers and your colleagues.”
For too many people, the idea of joint accountability is elusive because they have been programmed to think only in terms of the
“one” responsible, rather than the “group” responsible. Yet, you may ask, can people in an organization really assume accountability for the same things, the same results? Doesn’t that translate to “no one”
being responsible? Not at all. The teamwork concept, now popular throughout corporate America, requires a change from the old notion of singular accountability to one in which teammates work together to catch all the balls and score as many runs as possible. Steven Wheelwright and Kim Clark, authors of the book, Revolutionizing Product Development, write about the significant strategic and com- petitive advantages that result when team members understand this concept of joint accountability. After forming product development
“core” teams consisting of dedicated personnel from various functional departments in the organization, they observe:
Each core team member wears a functional hat which makes him or her the focal point and manager responsible for a function that delivers its unique contribution to the overall project.
But each core team member also wears a team hat. In addition to representing his or her function, each core team member ac- cepts responsibility for overall team results. In this role, the core team shares responsibility with the heavyweight project manager for the development procedures followed by the team, and for the overall results that those procedures deliver. The core team is accountable for the success of the project, and can blame no one but itself if it fails to manage the project, execute the tasks, and deliver the performance agreed upon at the outset.
What is unique in the core team members’ responsibilities is not so much their accountability for tasks in their own function, but the fact that they are responsible for how those tasks are sub- divided, organized, and accomplished.
Yes, it is vital that each individual in an organization be account- able, but, in addition, they must also share joint accountability with others.
In a case that recently came to our attention, a worker was assigned to the packaging department of a manufacturing plant. Not too long after arriving she detected serious problems with products coming from the production line. When she approached the manufacturing line supervisor to complain that “you guys are sending us too many defective products,” the line supervisor replied, “On this line there is no ‘you guys.’ You are as much a part of this line as we are.” From that point on she never said the words “you guys” again. Even more important, she started looking for solutions and stopped pointing fingers because she now understood that she would be accountable for not just her function but for the manufacturing plant’s final result.
In organizations where the idea of individual responsibility has taken root, an issue will arise such as product recalls, missed sales targets, or cost overruns. Each of these issues will prompt “unaffected”
departments to sit on the sidelines and rest quietly, relieved that a particular issue lies outside their realm of accountability and grateful they are not the one on the “critical path.” In an environment of joint accountability, however, everyone realizes that most issues extend beyond functional lines and require solutions that often necessitate wide-scale involvement. But how does joint accountability really work, and how do you manage it? How do you avoid getting dragged Below The Line when someone with whom you share accountability gets stuck in the victim cycle? The answers to these questions come from learning to hold other people as accountable for the desired outcome as you hold yourself.