What to hold people accountable for in organizational performance

Executive overview

Most leaders try to hold people accountable for hitting targets — and it backfires. When measures are used to judge individuals, people feel threatened, game the numbers, and performance deteriorates in a downward spiral.

The fix is separating individual performance conversations (use the Accountability Dial) from organizational performance measurement. Accountability for results means ownership of three distinct responsibilities — not hitting a number.

The core insight: people should be accountable for how they handle a measure, not for the measure's outcome.

The downward spiral of managing people with metrics

• Leaders monitor individuals to manage performance, triggering feelings of judgment and threat
• Employees manipulate data or modify behaviour to hit the target at the expense of other outcomes
• Call centre example: agents cut calls to under 3 minutes, hitting the target while customer problems go unsolved
• Leaders see declining performance and increase monitoring — the spiral continues
• Organizational performance is not the sum of individual performance; treating it as such creates dysfunction

Accountability #1 — monitoring important results

• One named person owns each measure: they volunteer to ensure it is designed, collected, and tracked over time
• Ownership creates intrinsic motivation — people report feeling "more influence than ever" and genuine excitement about measurement
• Example: a factory team chose to own the defect-per-product rate, pulling historic data to establish a baseline
• Leaders' role is to set direction and protect the team from having the measure used against them
• Replicating old behaviour — attaching the metric to individual performance reviews — destroys the model

Accountability #2 — interpreting measures validly

• Two data points are never enough; meaningful signals require at least 7–10 observations over time
• XMR charts (from the statistical quality movement) distinguish real signals of change from noise
• "Better than last month" is not a valid interpretation — leaders must actively challenge this
• Metric fixation (Jerry Mueller, The Tyranny of Metrics) narrows focus and loses the bigger context
• Leaders must link the team's measure to higher-level organizational results (e.g., defect rate → customer loyalty → rework costs)
• Make it safe to report bad news; frame curiosity about poor results as learning, not failure
• Skills take time — leaders must hold space for people to make early mistakes without punishing them

Accountability #3 — initiating action when needed

• The measure owner identifies when a signal requires investigation and convenes the team — without waiting for direction
• Frontline teams understand their own processes better than managers; they are best placed to diagnose causes
• Teams bring recommendations to leaders and ask for resources — leaders approve, they don't prescribe
• Leaders must combine patience with encouragement: "We're not looking for the right answer, just a hypothesis to test"
• One CEO bit his tongue about a better metric and let teams find it themselves; the result was a fully self-managing, flat organization
• When teams can manage their own results, hierarchy becomes less necessary

Using both frameworks together

• Organizational performance accountability (monitor → interpret → act) and individual performance conversations (Accountability Dial) are complementary, not alternatives
• The Accountability Dial (Jonathan Raymond) handles behaviour and contribution at the individual level
• Measurement handles the performance of processes, goals, and stakeholder promises at the organizational level
• Leaders who conflate the two — using KPIs to judge individuals — outsource people management to numbers, which reliably fails