4

Personal Accountability

“We are accountable for our decisions in our personal life so why shouldn’t we be just as accountable in our work life?”

–Catherine Pulsifer

While vision is about things that are fuzzy, distant and often pertaining to the ‘big picture’, a soft skill called ‘personal accountability’ deals with issues that are more transparent and immediate. This soft skill is about being an enabler of things and having the will to do anything in your power—technical and otherwise—to make things happen instead of passively spinning around as a cog in the wheel. Personal accountability is about how deeply you are committed to your job. It is about being thoroughly knowledgeable in all aspects of your domain, so that you can solve problems expertly, without twiddling your thumb or expecting someone else to do it for you. It is about how much you love your job and enjoy doing it. It is about how much you identify with your team and look out for it, instead of quickly blaming others for things going wrong. It is about accepting your role and responsibilities at work, without making any excuses. It is about looking inwards for directions, rather than waiting for your manager’s instructions on everything. It is about completing a job perfectly, without any loose ends. Given that so much excellence is expected out of all of us these days, this is indeed a very vital soft skill that you will need to excel in your job and become a shining star of your organization.

At first glance, personal accountability doesn’t even have the feel of a soft skill, let alone be considered in the same league as other seemingly interesting and apparently important soft skills like time management or presentation skills. If anything, it has an accusatory and negative ring to it, almost as if it is a whip that the management can crack on you, if they find something going wrong in your vicinity at work. So, to better understand what personal accountability means, you need to go beyond the touch and feel of this phrase and look at it deeply from various angles.

4.1 What Is Personal Accountability?

Personal accountability is much more than personal responsibility: Although personal responsibility sounds like personal accountability, we would like to distinguish between the two (some other authors may not share our views on this). In the context of business management, personal responsibility is more or less a synonym for job description—that verbose and almost legal-sounding statement, spelling out the requirements of your job. (Your HR department routinely comes up with such things, based on the division of labour in your organization.) After you joined your job, your boss probably added his own expectations—or responsibilities—to your job description and fattened it a bit. But still, it is only an approximation of what you actually do in your job and what your function and role in the organization really are. Personal responsibility may be a good starting point, but it definitely does not capture the spirit of your job. Neither can it alone be an inspiration for your career.

Personal accountability, on the other hand, is a much larger concept. It is an implicit collection of a lot of things like goal-setting and execution based on your stakeholders’ expectations, your own vision of your job, responsiveness to customers, the fire within you, your views and ideals—just about anything that will make you a self-starter and a clean-finisher of things in your area of expertise. While personal responsibility stopped after a few highlights, personal accountability is almost open-ended about what it includes.

And finally, personal responsibility doesn’t make any demands on your passion for your job. But a big part of personal accountability is your sense of commitment, pride in your workmanship, your own values and your quest for self-actualization. It makes your job a lively, interesting activity and puts you in the driver’s seat. Personal accountability is the difference between someone who just exists as a worker in the payrolls and that Mr Dependable, who moves and shakes an organization. Obviously, this makes the difference between someone who is successful in relating to the environment and someone who is not.

Personal accountability implies accepting ownership: Let us suppose that CBA’s customer, YZYZ Computers Corp., needs to have a new quality test developed. CBA may task Gupta with designing and implementing this new test procedure. In that case, it is not as if Gupta’s manager will tell him what exactly to do and Gupta will blindly do it. Most likely, his boss will give him a free hand (well, almost) and leave him alone to figure out what needs to be done—right from the technical aspects to things like tapping into the required resources, planning the schedule, communicating with the customer (and also with CBA management) and delivering the proper deliverable by the desired deadline. In effect, Gupta assumes ownership of this particular activity and is completely accountable for its perfect execution. Putting it another way, personal accountability implies that you assume complete ownership of your activities and it is almost as if you tell the stakeholders ‘Don’t worry, I will take care of everything.’ You are up and running and not meekly pushing some buttons, thinking your job ends by sending a few emails here and there.

Gupta in essence ‘owns’ his testing machine and is the king of his quality test work area. This new quality test he is trying to develop will be one more thing he will own—right from its conception to inception. He will be the single point of contact (SPOC) for his customer and other stakeholders on all aspects of this task. Ownership will no doubt give Gupta some leeway in planning and execution, but it will also add pressure on him. Call it ownership, call it accountability, Gupta is the point man for this new quality test.

Accountability is much more important when you interface with customers: If you interface with customers at work (such as Gupta of CBA), then personal accountability takes on a much larger meaning. Responding to customers effectively will be a big part of your personal accountability. You must remember that your customers are the reason why you even have a job. And you have to not just serve them, but ‘wow’ them.

And customers are usually the biggest stakeholders—at least the most vociferous—and they can be a very finicky lot. They don’t care for CBA’s internal workings or its organizational structure or how complicated Gupta’s testing can be. They are only interested in getting their job done, which is getting a new quality test in place and using it to test their merchandise. They will see Gupta as a gateway to CBA and will streamline their communication and dealings with CBA through him. Gupta now embodies complete CBA for his customer and may even be called to answer questions on say, billing. Even if he doesn’t know the answers right away, the onus is on him to get them from wherever. Thus Gupta now takes on additional ‘responsibilities’, thanks to his customers.

Personal accountability is a soft skill: Taking initiative at work, pushing for a solution and achieving complete closure is the essence of personal accountability. Several elements come together to make up this soft skill. It is something that you acquire out of your own choice and is not something thrust on you by your management. Nor is it something you are born with. Like all other soft skills, you can learn it, cultivate it and be good at it. It too, is part attitude and part techniques. Aspects of personal accountability like dedication to one’s job, loyalty toward one’s organization and so on basically belong to the attitude part of this skill and facets like problem solving and communication skills are more in the category of practical techniques. In this chapter, we will take a detailed look at some of these major attitudinal elements of personal accountability.

In today’s fast paced environment of high-tech global corporations, it is not unusual for employees to have to think on their feet and take some decisions on their own, instead of waiting to receive specific and detailed instructions on everything. In this sink or swim environment, an obvious ingredient to success is the ability to take ownership and be accountable (in the above sense of the word) to the (sometimes implicit) tasks assigned to you.

4.2 Components of Accountability

Let us look at some components of accountability in this section. We will do so through the example of Ajay Gupta, our test engineer and nominate him as the spokesman for the cause of personal accountability.

Taking initiative and boldness: The biggest component of personal accountability is the ability and the desire to take initiative to solve problems. It calls for a certain amount of boldness, a tremendous knowledge of the subject matter and a huge confidence in one’s skills. Gupta therefore, doesn’t need external pressures (such as his manager’s prodding) to get going on the activity.

A person like Gupta, designing a new quality test, may have to get into uncharted territories to invent such a test. Yet he is not daunted by the unknown. He is not lost or panicky or lazy about making a start. The quick start he gives to the problem he is dealing with, gives him a solid edge at the finish line. Also, he is not opposed to completely abandoning his first attempt if it doesn’t pan out and trying another approach. Gupta might consult with people who have more expertise than him on the subject or flip through technical manuals and books-but, that is just to complement his knowledge and not because he has trouble starting. This initiative stays with him every step of the way, as he arrives at the ‘best solution’ for the problem. Along the way, wherever necessary, he takes quick decisions and appropriate next steps. The idea is to not let the complexity of the problem flummox and stall him. The net result of all this is that he does whatever it takes to get a job done.

Sometimes, Gupta may land a simple problem. Even here, he doesn’t snicker at the simplicity of the problem, but instead goes methodically through with the solution.

Gupta’s initiatives may not be limited to just his customer’s problems. People like him with a good sense of accountability are in general also often volunteers. They take it upon themselves to solve any problem around them that they happen to notice (within limits of their bandwidth, ofcourse)—rather than assuming that somebody else will take care of it.

Problem-solving: People with a vast reservoir of personal accountability are also good problem solvers. The ability to grasp the given data, the clarity they have about the end goals, their familiarity with a variety of problem-solving techniques and finally the methodical way in which they actually solve the problem and implement the solution—are all hallmarks of such people.

Gupta might have considered several alternative approaches. He would have indulged in various problem-solving techniques like thinking outside the box, lateral thinking, brainstorming with others, making a decision-tree and design of experiments and so forth, on his way to arriving at the best design for his test.

There is also a time factor associated with Gupta’s activity—he needs to come up with a design by a specific deadline—and so, he will choose the appropriate problem solving technique to meet the time constraints. If there are going to be delays, he will first get a ‘buy-in’ from his stakeholders and proceed accordingly.

Accuracy and perfection: As a professional, Gupta is also accountable for his test to be accurate and perfect—even if perfection is a loosely defined word here. His test should be thoroughly debugged by him and by his customer so that it runs mistake free and remains the best solution. If there are things that can be tweaked to bring it to even greater perfection, Gupta will make those changes. Gupta will be graded on a number of sometimes very subjective parameters on the ‘perfection’ of his test like ease of use, consistency, robustness, accuracy, repeatability and so on, and he will have to come through clean on all these. What is more, Gupta’s own yardstick for grading will usually be far tougher than what others will grade him on. This naturally makes him ‘wow’ others in the environment.

If you are working with end customers, in spite of your best efforts to be perfect, mistakes may creep in for various reasons. In which case, readily and genuinely apologize even for minor infractions—even if your gut tells you to protest and argue your case. Try to recover from the situation quickly and make sure that your customers have only a minimal impact and inconvenience. Remember that often you will be the sole representative of your organization to your customers and should there be serious flaws in your product or service, you will have to bear the brunt of their wrath.

Exceeding expectations or wowing the customers: Given the highly competitive nature of today’s business world and how companies jump over each other to attract and retain customers, many customers now ‘routinely expect their expectations to be exceeded’. They expect to be positively surprised and awed and get a thing or two extra that they had not bargained for. So, it is not enough if you merely get a passing grade in responding to customers. You also have to show them finesse and impress them deeply. A high level of customer service calls for innovation, diligence and understanding your customers and is a part of personal accountability.

In Gupta’s case, maybe he can add a new feature to his quality test—an ‘automatic mode’ that will collect test data automatically and feed them into a host computer, thus increasing productivity and reducing errors. Such bells and whistles are becoming standard give-aways these days in the war for customers.

Managing performance expectations is so crucial that we have devoted an entire chapter, (Chapter 8), to it. People with a stellar sense of personal accountability routinely exceed expectations and this results in more satisfied stakeholders.

Taking up slack for others—relationship with team: A person who feels accountable doesn’t have the ‘It is not my job’ attitude. Nor does he ask questions like ‘Why doesn’t Misra do it? Why are they always sending them over to me?’ He doesn’t do any ‘inverse volunteering’ and try to get out of the assignment and pass it on to someone else. Instead, he gladly accepts his responsibilities and sometimes takes up the slack for someone else. He jumps in and helps the bigger team when it needs extra help—especially when the team is shorthanded because of some members’ non-availability. (We will deal with this in depth in Chapter 10 on ‘Stepping Up to the Plate’.) Ultimately, the team’s success is his success and he doesn’t think anything of doing that extra bit of work. In fact, some people invoke concepts like team accountability and shared accountability to look at this spirit of helping out one’s team.

Resourcefulness: Gupta is resourceful—which means he knows where to get what and who to approach for what kind of help. He knows he can use a couple of old electrical parts he had put away in a back drawer to quickly rig up a fixture and check out some concepts he plans to use in his new quality test instead of waiting for newly-ordered parts to arrive from Hong Kong next week. Although he owns the problem of designing a new quality test and has to find a ‘solution’ for it, he knows that he doesn’t have to do every bit of it all by himself. For the best solution, he knows he should tap into Sharma’s mechanical skills and Srivastav’s computer wizardry. He is also constantly trying to invent the best solution to the problem rather than just hit a passable one. He is resourceful enough to cut through bureaucratic hurdles of the company, get the requisite permissions and approvals and obtain all the information he needs to do his job. He never sits at his desk looking like he has reached the end of the road or looking confused and frightened by his assignment. In a nutshell, his resourcefulness helps him know exactly what he needs from the environment and that makes him a go-getter to get things done.

Open-mindedness: Personal accountability is characterized by open-mindedness about arriving at the most optimal solution to the problem on hand—which could sometimes mean abandoning some ‘standard’ ways of doing things and innovating. Gupta will also be open-minded about his customer’s special needs and demands and will respond to them, instead of giving a ‘No, cannot be done’ kind of reply. He will also be open about correcting his mistakes, apologizing for flaws in service and be open-minded about how else to exceed expectations. He is smart enough to not repeat the same mistakes again. He doesn’t have a cynical defeatist attitude. He will embrace others’ good ideas if they can be used in his problem solving, but will not blame anyone if those ideas do not work. He will neither show a ‘Not invented here (NIH)’ syndrome nor take a high-pedestal attitude of ‘I told you so’ when things go wrong. This makes him endearing to the group.

Communication and follow-through: A big part of personal accountability is taking on all responsibilities for communication. This includes constantly keeping in touch with the customers and updating them on the progress, informing your management of what is going on (and quickly alerting them to any problems), putting in the right paperwork, talking to the vendors and suppliers and engaging in lateral communication with colleagues and so on. Gupta will also have to set up a communication loop of interested stakeholders and pass on packets of information to all concerned in a timely fashion. If meetings, conference calls and so forth need to be set up, Gupta will have to take care of those things as well. He will display the same initiative and enthusiasm for such communication as he showed for his technical work.

Professionalism: Personal accountability also reveals your professionalism. Being a professional means bringing commitment to your work—that extraordinary sincerity and competence. Being a professional means that the moment you enter the doors of your workplace, you are single-mindedly pursuing your work and related activities and not getting side-tracked by other things. Rain or shine, whether you have personal problems or bad days, you are going to give your best to the job on hand and manage to deliver a huge load of high-quality output. You will be the workhorse that even plays hurt. And you don’t come up with lame excuses for not doing your job right.

A true professional is aware that his organization has many, many stakeholders (and perhaps some immediate customers) who crucially need his services. He also knows that he has to ‘earn’ his pay cheque and that it is not a gift cheque that is given to him no matter what. He has pride in being able to deliver high quality work and in making his stakeholders happy. He makes people count on him and puts them at ease with his dedication.

We discuss professionalism at several places in this book, with the intention of reinforcing these ideas in your mind. Often professionalism is so tightly interlinked with soft skills that it is difficult to say which the cause is and which the effect is.

4.3 Personal Accountability Vs Taking Matters into One’s Own Hands

While personal accountability implies taking ownership and doing what it takes to get the job done, it does not give you an unlimited license to do what you want. We will now discuss the thin line that separates personal accountability from uncontrolled anarchy.

Know the limits of your job, what you can do: Even though accountability implies that you have a fair amount of latitude in getting things done, you have to be aware of your technical and territorial limits. Gupta may be an ace test engineer, but even he may not be able to build new test equipment in two days. Nor can he build a machine that does all kinds of impossible testing. So, occasionally, Gupta will have to summon more help and take the problem upwards. Personal accountability doesn’t mean that you take on all kinds of unreasonable work and somehow get everything done without external help. An integral part of personal accountability is knowing when to seek external help, while trying to do as much as possible for whatever is within your capability.

Know the limits of your role in the organization: Personal accountability also means that you know your exact role in the organization and are aware of the limits of your authority. Respect your organizational structure. Don’t unnecessarily do other people’s jobs or overwhelm them and push them to the background in the name of taking initiative. In the ‘single point of contact’ customer-service model, you are supposed to provide all kinds of information to your customers—and do so as best as possible and by going through proper channels and interacting with the right people. Don’t short-circuit this process.

If you are a technical person like Gupta, do not get into serious finance or marketing discussions with the customers unless you are authorized to do so. You can bend over backwards for your customers, but remember that you cannot do anything you want just to please them. Do not behave like you are the CEO of your company and negotiate all kinds of things with them. Understand what you can and cannot do for them. Knowing your limits is part of relating well with the environment.

Take the blame too, where appropriate; don’t pass the buck: Sometimes, in spite of your best efforts, you may fail in the task you had set out to do—in which case, you graciously accept responsibility for not succeeding. It is not something to be ashamed of, but instead, it should lead to a detailed and objective failure analysis of how you and your organization can do better the next time. You don’t make excuses or shift blame on others.

If Gupta failed or was only partially successful in his promise to deliver a new quality test, he would ask himself questions like,

• Why did I fail?
• Why did I take so long to come up with this test?
• Why isn’t the test as elegant as I expected it to be?
• Why didn’t I exceed the expectations of my customers?
• Were they demanding too much out of me?

Whether done in the privacy of his desk or done in his manager’s office, failure analysis is a very important aspect of personal accountability.

4.4 Personal Accountability and You

Personal accountability benefits you in many ways. Not only does it give you a sense of fulfillment, but it also gives you tangible rewards and recognition. Let us look at a short list below.

You will be counted upon: You will find yourself included in important teams and assignments. You will be in demand. Sometimes it will overwhelm you that everyone wants you and includes you in their projects. (In which case, you have to make sure that you don’t overbook your calendar.) You will also see that you will be given much more freedom to execute. You will be labelled the ‘go to guy’ and people will know that you will somehow get things done.

You will be considered a troubleshooter: You will be perceived as a special troubleshooting ambassador—unravelling complicated problems, inking complex deals and completing impossible jobs. Your organization will have you represent it in meetings and negotiations. Even within the organization, you may be sent to trouble spots and tasked with fixing things.

You will not have the victim’s mentality or put the blame on others: There are enough people in the workforce who would take the high road and blame everyone and everything, when things go wrong around them. They would surmise that they did their best but were helpless because of powerful extraneous circumstances. They have a long list of things to blame—their own bosses, the stifling company policies, crabby customers, family problems, their ill-health ad infinitum. ‘It was Misra’s idea in the first place’ they would go on,’ ‘And I knew from day one that it would not work’. Although such self-pity may win them some support in the short run, it will not hold water in the long term. Here is where the personally accountable people differentiate themselves from the whiners and gallop forward. As someone famously said—Don’t complain. And don’t explain.

You will have the ability to learn lessons: You will see that you learn a lot of lessons on the job. Both from your successes and from your mistakes; by yourself and from the feedback you get. You will also see that you are constantly picking up cues on better time management, better communication and paying attention to details. You will learn about what it means to raise your quality level even higher. Your experience-base will grow. You will discover new resources—even the remote ones. You will figure out people’s mindsets and expectations. Every single day on the job affects you positively and you are better at the end of each day.

You will acquire the ability to ‘close’ issues: A lot of headaches at work occur because of imperfectly or partially ‘closed’ issues and projects. One of the hallmarks of a person with personal accountability is that he or she will completely finish off a project or activity with a touch of class—and no hanging threads.

You will be recognized: Personal accountability will earn you the label of a conscientious employee and may even put you in the elite ‘top 10 per cent’ category of your organization. You can imagine the kind of rewards and recognition that will follow, once you make the cut. But don’t expect anything in a hurry—most managements will wait long enough to make sure that you are truly, personally accountable and not a one-timer.

Most importantly, people who take personal ownership and accountability do so not for any of the extrinsic rewards stated above, but simply because taking ownership and accountability is the right thing to do and they enjoy doing it for its own sake. Taking ownership and accountability then becomes a habit that more or less is in their blood.

4.5 In Summary

The success of an organization like CBA Enterprises is largely due to the performance of their key employees like Ajay Gupta—who are solution seekers and who will take it upon themselves to solve problems completely to the satisfaction of their customers and other stakeholders. And the primary soft skill that sets them apart is personal accountability. Even though it may seem like a difficult concept to relate to at first, it will give you the winning edge. We conclude this chapter by listing out the key attributes of personal accountability and some examples of the same (see Table 4.1). These attributes lead to teamwork, the topic for the next chapter.

Table 4.1 Key attributes of personal accountability