I watched a 2018 talk by Simon Sinek this week in which he connected leadership and accountability. Sinek expanded upon the theme that great leaders and long-lasting companies put their people first, not numbers. He said:
“Accountability is never to a number. Accountability is to a person. And if there is no relationship with the person who’s supposed to look after us and the person we’re supposed to be working for, then we don’t feel accountable.”
Metrics disconnected from people don’t inspire. I love metrics. Yet how often do the measures of social outcomes and impact of projects come at the end of complex causal chains that diffuse responsibility and plausible deniability? Project assessments often occur after it is too late to change practice and priorities. Even when there is real-time and meaningful measurement, it takes courage to connect it to people. We avoid confrontation when projects fail by focusing on ‘approaches’ rather than people. We are more likely to ask, ‘what was responsible?’ rather than ‘who was responsible?’ Successful projects struggle to “go to scale” because organizations concentrate upon scaling up management and methods rather than leadership and teamwork.
Leaders and organizations are supposed to look after us and weave collective goals into the organizational DNA. We expect that the entity or person that sets the goals is the one who takes care of us and who we are working for. When public or private donors assert the metrics and goals for projects other than the organization’s metrics, it creates a cognitive dissonance between what the mission statement and org chart tell us and where we perceive that power resides.
Project-based funding creates a tunnel vision of organizations that leads to undervaluing leadership, talent recognition, and talent development. When your organization is diced up by matrices of project funding and accounting codes, it is easy to lose sight of the relationships that foster accountability. We can’t create exceptional social impact organizations with piecemeal funding, externally set metrics, insufficient recognition of leadership, and confusion of who is looking after who and who we are working for. Funders and organizations seeking performance are asking ‘how will you take care of your evaluation?’ when they should be asking ‘how are you taking care of your people?’
These are not universal problems. The solutions surround us and inspire us with a roadmap for success. There are leaders who speak their truth, only accept funding aligned to their plans, and who continually measure progress. There are organizations and funders who build trusting relationships that motivate each other. There are organizations that promote great leaders at any organizational level, amplify leader voices, and invest in leaders’ professional development and career development. There are organizations that form collaboratives with stakeholders to set the goals, metrics, and methods that support timely adaptation and learning. What Sinek helps us to understand is that all these behaviors act at a higher level at which the expression of care fosters relationship and inspiration. Accountability is to people, not numbers. Employees of nonprofits who put people first say things like “we work harder because you care about us.” The beauty of relationship-inspired accountability is that it is a two-way street that makes everyone better.
Photo by Miikka Luotio on Unsplash
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