Eric Coryell - Revolutionize Teamwork: How to Create and Lead Accountable Teams

Organizational Structure, Teams, and Accountability

Pretend for a moment that you own a company and everybody there reports directly to you. What would you like about that? Almost every answer I hear can be summarized in one word: control. Most people like having and being in control. But there is a downside to control: responsibility. While there are lots of positive emotions around the notion of being in control, the responsibility that comes with it can be exhausting. Imagine now that your company grows, and it becomes increasingly difficult for you to maintain control and shoulder all that responsibility. Departments get added. Layers start to build. Control and responsibility become dispersed throughout the organization. Next thing you know, your organizational chart ends up looking something like what you see in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Business Organizational Chart

This structure is typical of almost all businesses. Yet it wasnt conceived by a businessperson. It was developed by the Roman military. This model wasnt adopted by businesses until the early 1900s as companies started to grow in size, and it has been the norm ever since.

Figure 2: Military Organizational Chart

From a military perspective, this structure can be broken into four levels. From top to bottom, you have generals, officers, soldiers, and below that, the enemy. The generals primary role is to do the thinking. They are responsible for creating the vision and the strategy. The officers primary role is to do the telling. They are responsible for taking the vision and the strategy from the generals, translating it into actionable steps, and then communicating those to the soldiers. But their job does not end there. Once they tell the soldiers what to do, the officers have to verify that the soldiers actually did what they were supposed to. In other words, they have to hold the soldiers accountable. The soldiers primary purpose is to do what they are told. This structure works because it enables the generals and the officers to ensure that the things they want done get doneand when they dont, they can step in and take control until the desired results are achieved. I call this structure the Hold Accountable Model .

The Hold Accountable Myth

One of the first things I was told when I became a supervisor was that it was my job to hold my direct reports accountable. It sounded simple enough. And yet it wasnt. I tried many different strategies to get them to do what I thought was necessary, and while some of them seemed to work some of the time, none of them worked all the time. I began to realize it wasnt that simple. I now believe that it isnt even possible.

Lets start with what it means to be accountable. In the simplest terms, accountability is doing what is expected of you or doing what you said you were going to do within a stated time frame. If you meet the expectations set before you, you are being accountable to those expectations.