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Delegation and Accountability: Two Strings of the Same Bow.

Those of you who read the earlier separate articles on delegation and accountability may have noticed several similarities in the concepts, and that is no accident because these two building blocks of management are in truth two sides of the same coin, or as the title of this article says, two strings of the same bow. Yes, to have effective delegation, you need to hold your designees accountable, and to be successful in holding your subordinates accountable you must have effectively delegated the required authority.

Let us review the concepts. First Accountability. In leadership roles, accountability is the acknowledgment and assumption of responsibility for actions within the scope of a role or position, encompassing the obligation to report, and be answerable for resulting consequences. There are five basic requirements for creating accountability. You need to ensure you have:

- Understood Goals - the subordinate must understand what they and their team are trying to achieve;
- Buy in - subordinates must believe in the goal and be a part of the success;
- Benchmarks and a Quantifiable Result - subordinates need milestones and a result that can be measured;
- Two-way Feedback - feedback from the supervisor to the subordinate and from the subordinate to the supervisor;
- Evaluation - once a goal is accomplished, celebrate the success. Conversely, do not shy away from criticism if performance falls short.

Turning now to delegation, we said a basic principle of organizational management is that enough authority needs to be delegated to a manager to take the actions necessary for accomplishing an objective. It is also necessary for the limits of the authority to be clearly defined. This means that the subordinate to whom you have delegated the task knows not only what they may decide, but also what they may not. The same five requirements apply, clearly defined goals, buy in, benchmarks, feedback, and evaluation.

Repeating what we said before, to effectively delegate you must hold your subordinates accountable, and to hold your people accountable you must delegate the required authority.

In that statement is implicit the main reasons people fail at delegation and holding their people accountable. They cannot entrust authority to their people.  "How can I trust them not to make a mistake?" or "I need to know what is going on." The problem is that if you cannot overcome these fears, you are still the one doing the job. To be free to to the job you are supposed to be doing as CEO, you have to get over it. Once you do you will never be the same again, and surprise! surprise! not only will the work be done better, but you will get your life back.

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The Author After 25 years consulting to small and medium sized companies, Mike Anderson, principal of Train Me To Be a CEO realized that the most important part of his work was training the CEO, and the reason he was such a good consultant was that he did that very well. Trained as an engineer, he became a CEO of a midsize corporation at the age of 35. After a spell at Harvard Business School he entered the world of consulting. Read More

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