Assessing Accountability - A Corollary to Almost Beautiful
In previous articles in this series, I’ve argued that it’s important to reward striving for excellence (Almost Beautiful: The Margin of Mistakes) even when it falls short, and I’ve offered guidance on how to calibrate the courage (Calibrating Courage - A Corollary to “Almost Beautiful”) to strive for excellence while balancing it against the risks of making mistakes or stepping outside earned authority (Brave Ownership and Humble Ownership).
Yet we must acknowledge that mistakes will be made—sometimes serious ones—and accountability is a vital part of continuous improvement and of achieving that balance between risk and excellence.
Whenever something goes wrong, everyone’s natural reaction is to ask, “Who screwed up?” Usually, it’s the person nearest the failure who gets identified.
But it’s rarely as easy as assigning blame to the most convenient—or proximate—target. When something goes wrong, the better approach is to assess accountability with considerably more sophistication than simply finding the person who made the final mistake. Otherwise, we destroy the courage we’re trying to cultivate through Almost Beautiful striving, courageous calibration, and brave or humble ownership.
Accountability isn't merely deciding who pays for yesterday's failure. Done properly, it determines what the system should learn before tomorrow.
Let me share two examples.
When I was in high school in the 1970s, I was on the chess team. Chess clocks are used to ensure time-bound games in which each player has exactly the same amount of time to make all of their moves and win, lose, or draw before one player's time expires. Chess clocks were expensive pieces of equipment for teenagers in those days.
This story is about three teammates—let’s call them Tom, Dick, and Harry—and a stolen chess clock.
At a chess tournament, Tom needed to run an errand and asked Dick to keep an eye on his chess clock. Dick agreed. After a while, Dick needed to attend to his own affairs, so he asked Harry, who was in the middle of a tournament game, to keep an eye on it. Harry agreed.
When Tom returned and asked about his clock, Dick directed him to Harry—who then discovered that the clock had been stolen while he was engrossed in his game.
Tom was very upset. He blamed Dick and expected him to pay for the clock he had failed to guard. Dick claimed Harry should pay.
Who would you say deserved to be held accountable—and who should pay for the stolen clock?
Now let’s look at a business example using the same Tom, Dick, and Harry names.
One of my clients was acquiring a healthcare facility, and we were responsible for transitioning the IT equipment and services. This required wiping every machine and setting it up fresh to integrate into the buyer’s environment.
At the last minute, the client—fearing that critical patient information might be stored on the PCs rather than safely on the server or in the cloud as policy required—asked us to back up every machine before wiping it.
This would be a labor-intensive task, and the assigned team did not have the bandwidth to accomplish it within the time allowed. I had no more trained personnel available. However, I did have Tom, who worked on another team but had never done that particular job.
We assigned Dick to train Tom on how to back up a PC hard drive. Then we assigned Harry to oversee Tom’s work while onsite.
As it turned out, the client was right to be afraid. After all the wiping was complete, we discovered that critical patient-care information had indeed been stored on one of the wiped machines.
To our dismay, we also discovered that Tom had backed up only the tiny C: drives on each computer and had neglected to back up the D: data drives on any of them.
The critical information was lost forever. The client had to scramble to re-create it at great expense, with potential risk to patient health—not to mention compliance penalties.
And they wanted me to hold the right person accountable for the failure.
So, who should be held accountable?
The nurses—now the client’s new employees—who had failed to follow policy and store critical information in a safe place?
Dick, who had not trained Tom well enough?
Harry, who had not adequately overseen Tom’s work?
Tom, who, as an IT professional, should have known to back up all drives?
Me, since I had allowed a hurriedly trained technician to perform a critical job?
The client, who had suddenly made a last-minute request under severe time constraints?
It should be evident that there were plenty of opportunities to avoid the bad outcome.
The training should have been better. The oversight should have been better. The timeline could have been pushed back. If any one person had done their part better, the disaster might have been avoided.
It took all of them falling short together.
The point is that in almost any failure situation, there is rarely only one person who deserves to be held accountable. In my experience, it is almost always a team failure.
The trick is determining how much each participant contributed to the bad outcome and then using that assessment to inform fair accountability.
I recommend looking at three specific aspects of each person’s participation:
Execution
Responsibility
Capability
And each should be assessed with a good measure of reasonableness.
Beyond those three aspects, we also need to account for possible mitigating factors.
EXECUTION
Execution comes first because it provides the baseline against which degree of responsibility and extent of capability may add to—or subtract from—a person’s contribution toward the failure.
Each involved person’s execution can be measured against a simple sliding scale:
Execution Contribution
Competent Execution 0%
Almost Beautiful 10%
Minor Oversight 20%
Failure to Prep/Anticipate 30%
Inattention to Details 40%
Egregious Error 50%
Competent Execution — Everything done right by this individual.
Almost Beautiful — Striving for excellence but missing the mark; the shortfall must nonetheless be recognized.
Minor Oversight — Got most things right but a few things wrong.
Failure to Prep/Anticipate — Failed to prepare properly or anticipate reasonably foreseeable things.
Inattention to Details — Missed or ignored necessary steps.
Egregious Error — Ignored clear policies or procedures, or simply executed very poorly.
Use this scale to assess a person’s baseline contribution toward the failure, and then apply the modifiers from Responsibility and Capability.
RESPONSIBILITY
In Brave Ownership and Humble Ownership, I argued that within a person’s sphere of legitimate authority, they should be brave with their ownership. Outside that area, they should be humble with their ownership.
The same principle applies here.
The greater a person’s responsibility for a failed task or outcome, the greater the contribution that should be assessed. Responsibility should encompass the degree of ownership over the conditions producing the outcome, not merely, “Was this task part of the job?”
Here are some sample modifiers that may be applied to the baseline execution level:
Primary/Full — Task fully within sphere of ownership/normal responsibility: +30%
Shared/Partial — Task partially within sphere of ownership/normal responsibility: +20%
Peripheral — Task outside sphere of normal ownership/responsibility: +10%
None — Participated but had no true ownership or responsibility: +0%
Some readers may observe that the reverse scale could apply if a person were acting outside their sphere of responsibility in an unauthorized fashion. I agree.
This scale assumes the person was acting with authorization.
CAPABILITY
A final set of individual modifiers depends upon the person’s level of capability.
An intern is less likely to perform a task with excellence than a long-tenured team member. Capability includes many aspects of skill, training, knowledge, and aptitude. It also includes the person’s reasonable capacity to perform successfully under the circumstances.
For simplicity, here’s a proposed scale:
Clearly Capable — Task fully within the person’s reasonable range of capability: +30%
Reasonably Capable with Some Stretch — Task partially within the person’s reasonable range of capability: +20%
Marginal/Limited — Task outside the person’s reasonable range of capability: +10%
None — Could not reasonably be expected to perform successfully: +0%
Notice that these descriptions repeatedly rely upon the word reasonable.
If a person is asked to perform a task at or beyond the limits of their skills, training, knowledge, or capacity, that should count as a mitigating factor.
MITIGATING FACTORS
Bad Luck — Truly unexpected and unforeseeable events.
Stretch Effort — Effort at or near the limits of a person’s capability.
Health and Readiness — On any given day, a person’s ability to perform may be reduced by illness or other significant commitments.
Other Factors — Many other factors—or excuses!—may come into play at your discretion.
Notice that mitigating factors do not have specific assigned contribution percentages. In general, you might subtract 10–20% from contribution for any factor that legitimately applied under the circumstances.
And, of course, there may be no mitigating factors at all.
INDIVIDUAL AND OVERALL CONTRIBUTION CALCULATION
One important distinction before we do the calculation:
Contribution and accountability are not quite the same thing.
The framework below estimates each participant’s relative contribution to the conditions that produced the failure. That assessment should inform accountability, but it does not mechanically determine it.
Two people may contribute equally to a failure while appropriately experiencing very different forms of accountability.
To calculate an individual’s contribution to a failure, add their baseline Execution percentage to any Responsibility and Capability percentages, then subtract any Mitigating Factor percentages.
For the business-related Tom/Dick/Harry example above, I might have assigned scores like these:
Person Execution Responsibility Capability Mitigating Factors Individual Contribution % of Total
Nurses 0%* +10% +10% — 20% 10%
Tom 40% +10% +20% -10% 60% 30%
Dick 0%* +10% +30% -10% 30% 15%
Harry 30% +30% +30% -30% 60% 30%
Me 0%* +30% — -10% 20% 10%
Client 0%* +10% +10% -10% 10% 5%
Overall 200% 100%
*No execution responsibility applied.
Overall, the story looks like this:
The nurses created a vulnerability. The client and circumstances created a risk. I accepted the risk and created the operating conditions under which that risk remained. Dick and Harry were supposed to compensate for the risk. And Tom failed in the execution.
Narratively, I would explain the mitigating factors this way:
Tom’s training by Dick was rushed. But Dick had a reasonable expectation of Tom’s skill level, and the rushed training reflected that expectation.
Harry had many other duties under time pressure and relied upon both Dick’s training and Tom’s assumed skill set.
I had a reasonable expectation that the team's combined skill was sufficient for the task.
The client had often been forced into tight timelines, and we had previously delivered successfully under those conditions, so they had a reasonable expectation that we would do so again.
Looking at the table, it becomes apparent that although contribution to the failure was widespread, Tom and Harry carried the heaviest portions.
In the end, Tom and Harry received written reprimands. Dick received a verbal reprimand. The nurses received stern warnings from their new employer. The client put me on notice that I had taken a big withdrawal from the “trust bank” we had previously earned with them.
And the client paid the actual dollar cost of the failure.
Most importantly, we all learned a valuable lesson that allowed us to prevent the same thing from happening the next time there was a rushed acquisition.
Which did happen, by the way!
For the sake of space, accept the facts of this example at face value and avoid hypotheticals such as Dick or Harry raising concerns that were ignored. Nothing like that happened.
But do recognize that there can be many relationships among Execution, Responsibility, Capability, and mitigating circumstances that you will have to consider when calculating contribution and deciding upon accountability.
IN CLOSING
The Tom/Dick/Harry business case was an unusually deep one. Sometimes, as a leader, you will be fortunate enough to encounter a failure in which only a few—or perhaps even one—person contributed significantly, making accountability easier to assess.
But in all likelihood, significant failures will often be team failures, and you will need to apportion accountability fairly.
Hopefully, this approach makes that job both easier and fairer.
But one final caution:
CAUTION! Don't use this framework primarily to decide punishment.
Use it to decide response.
Those are different.
Contribution → Accountability → Response
1. Contribution: How much did this person's actions, omissions, responsibilities, capabilities, and circumstances contribute to the failure?
2. Accountability: Given that contribution and the nature of the person's role, what should they appropriately own?
3. Response: What should leadership actually do—coach, train, redesign, discipline, compensate, change authority, accept unavoidable loss, or something else?
Notice that only the first stage involves any calculation.
Stages two and three remain exercises of leadership judgment.
Accountability isn't merely deciding who pays for yesterday's failure. Done properly, it determines what the system should learn before tomorrow.
CHESS TEAM EPILOGUE
If you’re curious, my high school chess teammates eventually decided that the main fault lay with Dick, who had accepted a serious responsibility that he couldn't easily abdicate to Harry—especially considering that Harry was deeply engrossed in a tournament game.
We advised that Dick should pay Tom for the stolen clock and, if he wished, attempt to get Harry to share the cost since Harry had accepted the task, even if he probably shouldn't have.
We advised Tom that if Dick did not accept responsibility and chose not to pay, he should simply not trust Dick in the future.
What would you have done?
I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Acknowledgment: I’d like to thank my colleague Jordan Ellis for serving as my thought partner on this article. His insights helped me solidify my thinking and overcome gaps therein.