How to Resolve the Tension Between Accountability and Flexibility

In a follow up to my post about conducting high value monthly business reviews (MBRs), I want to comment on a critical distinction between flexibility and accountability.

Understanding this distinction can help you be intentional and explicit about the leadership culture you want to create.

As leaders, it is easy say that we want accountability within our culture – we want to meet our commitments to our company, to each other as a team, and to ourselves.

We also want flexibility to adapt and respond to changing business conditions. In an environment of constant change, we want a flexible culture.

So how are accountability and flexibility in tension?

When your culture is out of balance in the direction of accountability – you can create a tyrannical, no-excuses, make-the-numbers and meet the deadlines at all costs environment. This environment creates all sorts of problems and risks: employee burnout, turnover, short-term thinking, and even egregious ethical lapses.

When your culture is out of balance in the direction of flexibility – you can create a whipsaw, plan du jour environment where no one knows what the plan is on any given day. This environment creates all sorts of problems and risks as well: wasted resources, an underlying lack of coherent strategy and structure that enables people to execute and innovate, and a sense that there is no accountability to anything, since the target is always moving.

How does this tension reveal itself during MBRs? It is important to think about this distinction in advance of your MBRs – because here is where the rubber meets the road – and you and your team will be confronted with this distinction whether you’ve discussed it explicitly or not.

Here’s why: A key component of the MBR agenda (see previous post) involves reviewing objectives (financial and operating metrics) and progress on action plans. As an example, an action plan may be written as:

• Develop marketing launch plan by 01/31/2010 (plan owner)

Let’s suppose that you are conducting your February MBR – and this action plan, due January 31, is not complete. The fact that the action plan is or is not complete is just data – but what does the data mean? This question can easily be avoided – but it is important to understand the answer. Did a higher priority emerge due to changes in the business environment? Did the plan lack appropriate resources or focus? There are many possibilities and variations – and they are indicative of the leadership and performance culture that exists within your company.

How do we resolve this tension between accountability and flexibility? It an art, not a science, but here are some guidelines I find useful.

• Make sure your language and mindset reflects commitments to the business, to each other, and to yourself. What leaders really want is commitment to the big vision, knowing that how you get there will evolve over time. Pay attention to the specific language that you and your team use when reporting on status. Do people say “We missed our deadline” or “This project is still in progress?” In a supportive way, it is important to create ownership around the facts – stating “we missed our deadline” implies ownership of a missed commitment – whatever the underlying reason for the delay. Saying “it is in progress” may seem comforting, but dodges the facts and minimizes ownership.

• Sense when a missed commitment is reasonable or if it reflects a pattern or underlying performance problem. You need to be candid enough to discuss what a missed commitment means. When missed commitments become a pattern, they generally point to an underlying performance problem. Sometimes, a missed commitment simply reflects a prioritization decision that occurred in between the MBRs. In my experience of conducting MBRs, people generally meet most of their commitments but fall short on one or maybe two – which leads to the next point.
• Narrow your focus to fewer action plans. In the early stages of using the MBR process, you’ll discover that you and your team are generally overcommitted. Most organizations try to put too many plans into action – and then they miss one or more of them. When you acknowledge that it is better to execute one or two action plans really well than to have five or more on your list – but miss two, you’ll create an environment that is both more relaxed and higher performance. The alternative is to get much more focused and decisive on what really needs to be done – and to really think through what will really be required to get the job done.

Perhaps the best guideline is to have a specific discussion on this topic with your leadership team as you conduct your MBRs – get your team to wrestle with this tension and to become clear on the leadership culture you are creating. The tension between flexibility and accountability does not go away – but by naming it you can craft the right approach for your organization.