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Mike Giorgionne taught our class a whole lot about leadership in an extremely short amount of time.  Ever since he attended our class on Thursday, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the questions he asked, the advice he gave, and all of the wisdom he imparted.  While every second of the session was intriguing, there’s one specific topic that’s still salient for me even today, three days removed – the responsibility and accountability that accompany authority.

Listening to our class attempt to discern the difference between these two concepts was probably one of the most interesting things I’ve experienced in class all semester; it was challenging and difficult to reach a conclusion on the matter.  In fact, I’m still not sure I know how to pinpoint the difference between the two, or even how to accurately describe them independently.

In order to make the distinction between responsibility and accountability a bit easier for me to grasp, I decided to do some research.  I was surprised when I found that the Planned Success Institute (PSI), an organization that helps people develop their leadership skills, wrote an entire three-page article on “Accountability vs. Responsibility.”  They claim that it’s important to make a distinction between the two ideas because “In the world at large, many speakers use these words interchangeably, with confusing results.”

According to PSI, accountability can be considered “the quality or state of being subject to giving a statement or explanation of one’s activities, conduct, and discharge of commitments and duties, or of underlying or explanatory reasons, causes, grounds or motives.” In contrast, they define responsibility as “the quality or state of being answerable as the primary source, cause, motive or agent of something.”

Ultimately, I’m not completely sure that I agree with these definitions.  Interestingly, I don’t know that I can tell you why.  Even after having the definitions of accountability and responsibility spelled out for me in plain terms, I still have a difficult time of knowing exactly what each entails.  However, something I’ve come to learn this week is that perhaps it’s not important that we’re able to stipulate what each means specifically; maybe it’s more important that we simply acknowledge that responsibility and accountability necessarily follow leadership, and will always need to be considered.  In other words, I’m not sure that it’s important to know whether we’re being either responsible or accountable, but that we have a profound respect for the fact that they’re both needed and expected.  We must always be prepared to “take the shots when someone under [us] messes up” – as Mike Giorgione put it – and must always be ready to step up, make decisions, and be willing to accept consequences in any situation.

Something else I found interesting in this article from the Planned Success Institute was a paragraph that outlays the distinction between accountability and responsibility:

“While both words deal with actions and choices, responsibility is about assigning causality to a person, group or thing. It is a way of saying, “you are the creator of ‘X’ through your choices.” Accountability is about what sequence of actions and choices actually came to pass. It is a way of saying, “as the party responsible for the choices leading up to ‘X’, I will now be accountable by reporting the choices I made.”

In many ways, this paragraph reminds me of the distinction between the two ideas that Asia made in class on Thursday – a differentiation on the basis of responsibility coming before the fact, and accountability coming after.  Of all attempts to clarify the specific meaning of accountability and responsibility, I found this to be the most helpful.

In the end, like I said earlier, I don’t know that we have to know the exact definition or distinction between each of these words in order to be both responsible and accountable.  Instead, I think it’s more important to recognize that we have to try to embody all that they entail, whether we know if each characteristic allows us to be responsible, accountable, or both.  In the future, I’m going to seek to be more responsible and accountable in every facet of life; I find that often, I focus on simply doing a good job and neglect the fact that I need to be prepared to “take the shots” when something doesn’t go as planned, or when another member of my team makes a mistake.

In contrast, I’d also like to focus on what Dean Brady told us in class on Thursday – that often instead of controlling a situation, we have to let other people take responsibility and allow a situation to pan out without intervening in order to let a teammate or friend learn.  I find this incredibly hard to do, especially in group projects, but I think that I’ll learn invaluable lessons as a leader if I simply try to do this more often.

I don’t anticipate responsibility and accountability to be an issue with our policy projects, but with the knowledge I gained this week, I’m more prepared to be a valuable member of my group, and am ready to trust my teammates wholeheartedly by having faith that we are all are both responsible and accountable.

 

Source:

Click to access Accountability%20vs%20Responsibility.pdf