Requirements of Successful Managers

Managers uphold the responsibility for decisions and actions made in a company. To achieve the most positive outcome, managerial performance is key to accountability. How managers leverage their ability to negotiate and motivate teams is just one area covered in this overview. The SMART model is a good framework (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-targeted) for goal setting. How many of a manager's roles have you already taken on? Which ones interest you, and which ones would you prefer to avoid? How can you adjust your management style within the confines of your organization to enjoy managing your teams and using your best skills most of the time?

The Importance of Accountability

Being accountable simply means being responsible for decisions made, actions taken, and assignments completed.


LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Discuss the role accountability plays in driving managerial performance.


KEY TAKEAWAYS


Key Points
  • Accountability in business is critical, as the concept enhances the ethics of managers.
  • Being accountable means standing by decisions, actions, and the overall well-being of projects.
  • Accountability is also a management process that ensures employees answer to their superior for their actions and that supervisors behave responsibly as well.
  • Accountability addresses both the organization's expectation of the employee and the employee's expectation of the organization.
  • Accountable employees help to increase performance of business as a whole and to maintain a positive company culture, vision, and ethics.
  • Accountability on a global scale, particularly in the case of NGOs, is complicated by the fact that different countries have varying legislative perspectives when it comes to accountability.


Key Terms
  • accountability: Being responsible for one's own work and answering for the repercussions of one's own actions.
  • paradigmatic: Pertaining to a given template, context or model.


Introduction

In organizations, accountability is a management control process in which responses are given for a person's actions. These responses can be positive or negative. Depending on the response, the person might need to correct his or her error. In other words, accountability refers to individual responsibility for the work performed and answering to peers and superiors for performance.

Accountability is often used synonymously with responsibility, blameworthiness, and liability. As an aspect of governance, accountability has been central to discussions related to problems in the public, non-profit, and corporate sectors.

In leadership roles, accountability is the acknowledgment and assumption of responsibility for actions, products, decisions, and policies including the administration, governance, and implementation within the scope of the role or employee position. Accountability also encompasses the obligation to report, explain, and answer for resulting consequences. As leaders often make decisions with far-reaching consequences, accountability has a substantial ethical component.

Government accountability: Governing authorities have the obligation to report, explain, and answer for resulting consequences of their actions.


Accountability in Companies

Accountability also has a strong connection to expectations. Employees who do not meet the expectations of their supervisor are held accountable for their actions and must answer for their inability to do so.

Accountability is crucial to ensuring high performance within an organization. However, managers must clearly communicate their expectations to the person who is responsible for the specified action or task. Clear communication of expectations and well defined goals is a very effective tool to enhancing performance at every level of organization.

Without defined goals, employees lack a frame of reference for how they are performing in the workplace. They are unable to rely on guidelines or a structure that helps them achieve their performance goals. In many organizations, the management team and board of directors create goals for themselves and the general manager, while the general manager creates goals for department managers. This process is replicated throughout the organization, down to the department managers who create goals for entry-level employees.

Both subordinates and supervisors should have a clear idea of how their projects should be handled and delivered. A clear expectation level and the understanding that all employees are accountable for their performance boosts employee morale and productivity in the workplace. However, because different individuals in large organizations contribute in various ways to a company's decisions and policies, it is often difficult to identify who should be accountable for the results.


Global Accountability

Recently, accountability has become an important topic in the discussion about the legitimacy of international institutions. Because there is no global, democratically elected body to which organizations must account, global organizations from all sectors' bodies are often criticized as having large accountability gaps.

One emblematic problem in the global context is that of institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which are founded and supported by wealthy nations and provide aid in the form of grants and loans to developing nations. The question persists as to whether these institutions should be accountable to their founders and investors or to the persons and nations they help.

In the debate over global justice and its distributional consequences, those in highly developed, heavily populated areas tend to advocate greater accountability to traditionally marginalized populations and developing nations. On the other hand, those who adopt a more nationalistic or provincial view deny the tenets of moral universalism; they argue that beneficiaries of global development initiatives have no substantive entitlement to call international institutions to account. The One World Trust Global Accountability Report, published in a first full cycle from 2006 to 2008, is one attempt to measure the capability of global organizations to be accountable to their stakeholders.


EXAMPLES


Example 1

The United States Department of Organization provides specific guidelines about accountability of managers. Managers are responsible for the quality and timeliness of program performance, increasing productivity, controlling costs and mitigating adverse aspects of agency operations, and assuring that programs are managed with integrity and in compliance with applicable law.


Example 2

The situation at Enron is another strong example of accountability – where the actions of a few unethical individuals caused great harm to the broader corporation and all stakeholders. In the case of Enron, the individuals involved in the negative actions are held accountable for the subsequent consequences, which reduces the likelihood similar things will happen again in the future.

Source: Boundless, https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-management/chapter/core-requirements-of-successful-managers/
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