before he hired her, but she was most enthusiastic about working for the company. “I can teach people how to do a job,” he said, “but I can’t teach them to be passionate about doing it.” During the initial phase of her employment, Nadine impressed Marcus by how quickly she acclimated to the work. “Some of her colleagues told me how personable she was, and a few clients said she was friendly and efficient. That counts for a lot.”
But the quality of Nadine’s work started to suffer. She stopped responding to Marcus’s emails and texts promptly. She didn’t complete basic assignments she said she was going to do. And she made a lot of excuses for why things weren’t getting done. “She went from working to shirking,” Marcus said. He gave her many opportunities to improve, but things got worse, not better. Nothing in Nadine’s personal life had changed, but for whatever reason, it became clear that Nadine wasn’t accountable to her employer. Marcus fired her and quickly found a replacement he can count on.
“Hype artists — people who promise a lot but don’t deliver — usually get found out pretty quickly and don’t last long,” says Jonathan Taplin, whose extensive career in the film, television, music, and financial industries has included producing Martin Scorsese’s film Mean Streets, working with George Harrison to organize the Concert for Bangladesh, overseeing media mergers and acquisitions at Merrill Lynch, and creating the world’s first video-on-demand internet service. Employees who repeatedly fail to do what they say they’ll do damage their reputations and their employability, Jonathan adds. Blaming others or making excuses for their mistakes doesn’t do them any favors, either.
Or as Melvin Meads, my high school band director, used to say, “We could have the Tonight Show’s lead trumpet player in the band, but it wouldn’t do us any good if he showed up late for rehearsal all the time.” He said this just before telling a latecomer to go home.
Failing to Hold People Accountable Costs Businesses Money
Laura, a senior human resources manager at a large hospital, told me about Hank, an employee who many believed was taking kickbacks from a pharmacy for patient referrals. He had also been a poor performer for a long time. Eventually the company decided to fire him, but since he was a union employee, the company chose to reach a financial settlement with Hank rather than go before a third-party arbitrator, as required by the union.
“We settled for the highest amount I’d ever settled an arbitration for,” Laura said. This was partly because there weren’t enough people willing to go on the record to document Hank’s alleged misconduct, so the company would not have fared well in arbitration. “But part of that settlement,” Laura observed, “is the penalty we pay for not having dealt with Hank’s substandard work performance. There are financial consequences for failing to hold people accountable.”
This is true in nonunion environments too, notes Alan Tecktiel. “When employees are not held accountable until the point when they need to be fired, companies are usually forced to provide a severance package to avoid legal trouble. Depending on the size of the company, this can cost millions of dollars.”
Obstacles to Accountability
What gets in the way of being accountable at work?
An Organizational Culture That Doesn’t Value Accountability
Wouldn’t you expect that after the government bailouts of 2008 and 2009, a company like General Motors would go out of its way to avoid even the perception of wrongdoing? Recently, however, GM has been called before Congress to account for its failure, for over a decade, to recall thousands of defective automobiles that resulted in more than a dozen deaths.
According to CEO Mary Barra, the problem had to do with “bureaucratic processes that avoided accountability.” In practical terms, this meant that no one in the chain of command was willing to take responsibility for mistakes. Gretchen Morgenson reported in the New York Times that an internal investigation revealed the following common practices:
• Executives learned about defective ignition switches at committee meetings but either took no action or punted the matter to other committees. Because minutes of meetings were rarely taken, it was impossible to discover who had made decisions.
• Some evasive ploys by executives became so common that they acquired names. In the GM nod, attendees at meetings agreed to take action but then adjourned with no intention of actually doing anything. The GM salute entailed a crossing of the arms and pointing outward toward others, indicating that the responsibility belongs to someone else, not me.
• In a rhetorical move worthy of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, employees were forbidden from using certain words in their written communications. A “problem” became an “issue”; a “defect” was changed to a feature that “does not perform to design.”
The buck stops with the CEO, so Mary Barra was on the right track in identifying a systemic resistance to accountability at GM. Now comes the hard part: changing the culture. The jury is still out on whether GM will be able to achieve that.
The Urge to Overpromise
Why don’t people follow through on what they say they’re going to do? When I fail to keep a promise I make, it’s not because I don’t intend to keep the promise when I make it. That’s what Jean-Paul Sartre calls “bad faith.” Rather, it’s because I want to please the person who is making the request and don’t think about how much effort it will entail.
For example, in 2013 I gave a talk to a group of association executives, and a member of the audience — I’ll call her Alison — approached me after the speech and asked me to write an article for her organization’s magazine. I was honored and agreed on the spot to do it. As the deadline for the piece approached, I found myself swamped by promises I’d made previously (namely giving talks to other organizations), and I missed the deadline. I contacted Alison, apologized profusely, and asked if I could still write the piece for her.
No dice. The magazine had contracted with someone else. I suspect I’m permanently on the do-not-call list for this group, and I have no one to blame but myself.
Instead of promising Alison right away that I’d write the article, I should have carefully reviewed my schedule to see if I’d have time to take on the project. An honest assessment would have shown me that I would not be able to do it (at least not well). But I wanted to please her, so my knee-jerk reaction was to say, “Yes, I’d love to do it!” Ironically, my failure to follow through thwarted my desire to please her.
Time, Money, and Energy
Early in my career as a professional speaker, a prestigious high school hired me to deliver a talk on ethics to the faculty. Just as Karen Jacobsen did with Mel, I trusted the person I was working with to honor our agreement. In fact, I had a written contract, which stated that payment was due on the day of the presentation. The school’s representative, Enid, assured me the day before the talk that she had the check ready to deliver.
I arrived well before the starting time and asked Enid to confirm that the check would be available after my talk. “Well, I thought I’d have it by now, but I promise I can get it to you tomorrow,” she told me. The school was technically in breach of contract, but I didn’t see why over one hundred faculty members had to be penalized for a failure they had nothing to do with, so I gave the speech.
The next day Enid told me that she was having trouble getting the check processed. “No later than next week,” she assured me. Weeks, then months, passed with no payment forthcoming.
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