Accountability and Transparency

Accountable people and organizations know that an important part of being accountable means being answerable by providing an accounting for how they have discharged their duties, responsibilities, and stewardships. Accountability always produces transparency. To be transparent is to be “easy to perceive or detect; to be open to scrutiny.” Wherever you find true accountability, you will encounter an “ease and efficiency in perceiving or detecting” how things are going, as well as a general “openness to scrutiny.”

Transparency manifests itself in people and organizations when they:

– Proactively report on their progress, instead of waiting to be asked;

– Share information publicly about progress, or the lack of it, instead of  hiding it;

– Ask for feedback on their performance, instead of avoiding it;

– Openly acknowledge when things are not going well; instead of assuming it’s obvious; and

– Give credit to the right people when success is achieved, instead of only applying transparency to things that go wrong.

A lack of transparency almost always indicates that accountability is inadequate or missing. One large-scale change project we worked on involved a company that was facing serious product development issues. R&D had been behind schedule on a new product platform for over two years and things were about to get worse. During an annual conference with the company’s top 100 leaders, the CEO confirmed the latest launch date for the new product platform. A week later, in an interview we conducted with the R&D VP, he revealed that there would be another twelve-month delay in the launch of the new product platform. When the word got out, everyone was shocked—particularly the CEO. No one had seen it coming. In the aftermath, the R&D VP acknowledged that he’d never taken ownership of the date. And since he did not feel accountable for it, he offered no transparency regarding it; in fact, he sought the opposite, ambiguity and detachment. Hiding the facts in this silo-oriented company was too easy. It was a part of their culture they chose to ignore at their own peril.

Whenever you see someone offering transparency, it is a sure sign that they are taking accountability—the kind of accountability that will produce results. When it is missing, you would be well served to ask the question, “What are you pretending not to know?” Real accountability produces transparency; transparency produces accountability. You cannot have one without the other.

For more ideas about how to create a Culture of Accountability where people freely offer this kind of transparency around the work that they do, sign up for one of our complimentary Author webinars by visiting https://www.partnersinleadership.com/.