Accountability and Responsibility

How does a service company run? For a market perspective, what is its need? Why does it exist?

To provide a valuable service to its customers that they are incapable of doing or choose not to do themselves.

Who in this organization provides this service?

#The technical team –

Technical Teams in the organization are the main pillars on which organization relies on.

In order to succeed as an organization, they need to look at themselves as a chain of individuals, taking personal and group responsibility to achieve the organizational goals. And like any chain they are only as strong as the weakest link in the chain.

Management and other function like, Operations, HR & Internal IT acts as enablers and less as governors. The main role is to enable Technical Teams and the organization to be at its most efficient in delivering more value to customers. Technical Team have to be the value creators, value generators by taking Accountability/Responsibilities.

What is accountability?

We can define Accountability as taking ownership of deliverables and making sure the job gets done whatever it takes. It may entail taking help from others, if we are stuck but ones absolute focus should be on making sure of the delivery success. 

Realize the responsibility lies with us and it is our responsibility to do whatever follow-ups are needed to ensure success. It means doing the right thing consistently, day in and day out, in tasks and relationship interactions to fulfill or further the mission of the organization.

Why do we need accountability?

1.      If we want an organization that is very flexible to our needs and has a flat hierarchy with nobody monitoring every individual all the time, it comes with the responsibility of delivering what the organization needs to meet its goals.

2.      If we do not measure accountability and delivery, we will have a situation where the high performers are picking up the slack for the low performing members

Lets see how we can improve accountability in Organization

1. Have a very clear organizational mission and goals
2. Management takes responsibility of keeping focus of everyone on this mission and goals
3. Management to provide roles and associated corporate objectives rather than specific tasks. Everyone in the company works and is responsible for its success. As an organization avoid getting into a culture of this is not in my role / responsibility. Why should I do it? In that sense people should have an attitude of we do whatever is needed, whatever it takes to meet our and organizational goals.
4. Individuals set SMART goals for themselves aligned with organizational goals
5. Quarterly performance review against the goals at individual, team and organization levels