Accountability: It’s Not Just for Field Operations

Throughout my varied career, I understood “accountability” to mean that people are held responsible for doing what they are supposed to do, with consequences for poor or non-performance. It wasn’t until several months into a project with a client that I discovered that the fire and rescue service uses this term in a very specific context – i.e., knowing exactly where all personnel are during an incident. No wonder this client and I had such divergent opinions when we talked about the degree of accountability in his organization! Because his agency did an exceptional job of training its members and tracking them during emergencies, the fire chief gave the organization very high marks for accountability. My evidence that accountability was MIA included consistent lack of progress on multiple initiatives, including those deemed “high priority,” the norm of lamenting poor performance but not doing anything about it, and the receipt of failing grades from audit reports assessing the status of promised employee relations improvements. This agency is not alone: over the years, multiple fire chiefs have confided that they find it challenging to get others, including sometimes their command staffs, to follow through on projects assigned to them.

My observation: the strict accountability protocols and standards used in the field often are left there; they are not a part of daily life back in the offices and stations. For example, tasks are assigned with little or no description of the desired outcomes, or they are delegated to a group of people, or there are no designated measures of progress or completion, or missed deadlines are simply extended without repercussion or question. As a result of lax or non-existent accountability mechanisms, forward motion often is excruciatingly, and unnecessarily, slow.

Here are a dozen actions you can take to increase the level of accountability throughout your agency:

1. Select the appropriate person/people for the task or project.
2. Designate one person as the responsible party.
3. Provide the information, resources, authority, and other support needed for the responsible party to be fully successful.
4. Set clear, measurable performance expectations, including deadlines.
5. Establish specific consequences for poor or non-performance.
6. When necessary, implement those consequences.
7. Communicate the appropriate information widely and frequently – e.g., the status of the project, the impact it will have.
8. Establish objective measures of both progress and achievement.
9. Specify the context for the importance of the task’s/project’s outcome – i.e., the impact of its completion (or non-completion) on the agency’s mission.
10. Develop appropriate and easily usable tracking mechanisms.
11. USE those tracking mechanisms.
12. Require regular status reports and make them public.

Accountability is not rocket science. However, holding people responsible for their performance in all parts of the organization does require developing and implementing effective processes. It also requires a culture in which accountability is the norm throughout the agency, not just in the field.

What accountability mechanisms do YOU use that are effective? Let us know!

© 2013 Pat Lynch. All rights reserved.