3 Strategies to Add Accountability to Your Decision-making
Accountability requires intentionality.
Teams need accountability in their day-to-day decision-making, but leaders often don’t know how to create it.
As a consultant, I have seen so many teams try to work with racial equity in mind but get tripped up by not having a plan to create accountability. This is a place where so many organizations get stuck time and time again. To start, let’s define accountability.
Accountability is all the ways in which organizations hold themselves to their goals and actions while acknowledging the values and communities to which they are responsible. It needs its own plan and approach. In short, when an organization (or a team) changes a practice, it must also create a strategy to hold themselves accountable to maintain the change.
Let’s use a concrete example.
Organization A begins conducting a racial equity impact analysis on its policy recommendations, as a practice. Organization A decides to use a Racial Equity Impact Analysis Tool when making any policy recommendations. The team understands the complexity of the current policy environment, but they have a steadfast commitment to understanding the impact of their work on different people in their community. Now, the sticky place becomes how that organization holds itself accountable for the change in practice.
You can create an accountability strategy in three steps.
Step 1: Create a shared understanding of why the shift is important. In my work, this is an “equity why”.
Organization A establishes a clear why for the practice change. The why includes the desired outcome.
Part 2: Keep organizational or team commitments
Organization A holds the policy director accountable for staff conducting the analysis across program areas as well as supporting staff to grow their capacity and increase their confidence.
Part 3: Maintain transparency in decision-making.
Decision rights are clear. Everyone on the project team understands how the decisions are made when organizational priorities conflict.
Accountablity should exist at each place in an organization where decisions are made.
Work From A Consistent Why
Accountability is a “how question”, but before getting there, you need a shared why. By why, I mean why racial equity matters to your organization, company, or philanthropy. Tools — even great ones (like the Racial Equity Impact Analysis Tool) — can't create a shared why. The starting place for a consistent “why” is your organization’s mission and vision.
The "how" is not likely to be applied if the "why" is not clear.
- Jill Schwartz, World Trade Center Institute
Keep Organizational/Team Commitments
Circling back to the earlier example, using the Racial Equity Impact Analysis Tool for policy is an organizational commitment. One way to keep this commitment is to add the tool to your organization's existing process. It starts with how policy recommendations are made. The answer to this question should include both people and processes. Creating an accountability plan requires a realistic view of power and its connection to consequences. In this context, organizations and leaders within them have positional power to keep commitments. Now, willingness is a different story, but power — yes. Use it. Accountability is often viewed through a lens of punishment, e.g., what happens when you don’t do something. Today, we have the opportunity to reframe it by moving away from reporting and moving toward accountability planning as concrete action.
Maintain Transparency in Decision-making
Transparency in decision-making is critical to equitable practices taking hold inside of organizations and within teams. In this sense, transparency means clearly outlined, openly communicated decision-making processes. It’s in the “how” of how decisions are reached. Now, let's unpack this a bit more. It's been my experience that people often confuse equity in decision-making with equality in decision-making.
The difference is that equity in decision-making recognizes that people are situated differently, while equality in decision-making positions everyone's opinion or everyone's feedback as carrying the same weight. In most organizations, not every person has an equal say in decisions. I had a nonprofit executive say this exact thing to me. The leader said, “I want to know what the staff thinks about the approach I want to try. But I am responsbible to the Board and the membership, so I will be making the final decision on how we proceed.” Some decisions are strictly made by a leadership team, an executive director, or a president.
The challenge and the opportunity for leaders in creating transparent decision-making is two-fold:
Be honest when there is an opportunity for feedback and when there is not; and
Accept that staff may not like your decisions.
Accountability can be a murky concept because we don’t often share the same understanding of what it means. Use the three steps outlined here to add greater clarity and accountablity to your decision-making proceses.
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