Uncommon Accountability

8CAPABLE LEADERSHIP

Personal accountability is rooted in the fundamental human ability to choose. Productive choices lead to higher performance, facilitate learning and growth, and increase fulfillment. A corporate focus on fostering individual choice puts decision power where it belongs – in the hands of the person charged with doing the work – and as an additional and highly valuable benefit it reduces the workload for leaders.

In a consequence management system on the other hand, performers are encouraged to optimize a suite of consequences that have been created and/or amplified by management. The performer's focus in these systems is not necessarily on optimizing overall outcomes, but rather on managing and manipulating the consequences of the system. In other words, employees will optimize their consequence outcomes, not necessarily the overall system outcomes.

When a performer is in a system where consequences are the primary lever to drive performance, workers rarely achieve what they are truly capable of. With consequence management, you can produce improved results in certain situations, but not what your team is ultimately capable of, and you will likely experience pushback on the process and resentment against you as the leader.

Consequence management is based on someone with organizational power (the leader) coercing someone with less organizational power (their ...