The gift of accountability.

“BUT DO I WANT all that accountability?” I hear this question whenever someone I’m working with is contemplating a new or expanded role. It’s often accompanied by a mix of excitement and dread—excitement at the opportunity, pride in the respect and authority it confers, eagerness for a new challenge. But all of that is tempered by the very natural fear that also arises: what if I can’t do it? What if everything goes haywire? What if I’m the one left holding the bag?

These are reasonable fears. Exercising some humility and caution at the edge of a threshold is a useful and instructive skill. But they also point to the ways in which our understanding of the concept of “accountability” has been dramatically foreshortened. What could be a generative and welcoming space has become, instead, fraught and threatening. I want to look at why that is, and begin to make some room to think through what we can do about it.

The problem starts, I think, with the fact that our knee-jerk response to the question of “what does it mean to be accountable?” is too often “the person who gets fired when things go wrong.” This is a measure of accountability that equates accountability and punishment: to borrow from Sidney Dekker, it makes accountability something you settle, a debt you have to pay. When you’re accountable for a car accident, you pay the fine; when you’re accountable for not hitting the annual target, you lose your job. Among the many problems with this model is that it inspires people to avoid accountability whenever possible. (It was the other driver that caused the accident, the other manager that made the team miss the mark.) But no one learns anything from that kind of blame game. And no one should be faulted for perhaps not wanting in on the game at all.

Fortunately, that’s not the only model for accountability we have. Webster’s 1913 defines accountability as being “called on to render an account.” To render an account is to tell a story. In this way, an account becomes something you give—something you observe, come to understand, and then narrate. Being accountable in this model means being the storyteller rather than the fall guy. And because stories are perhaps the best technology we have for learning—for passing knowledge and understanding along from person to person—this form of accountability privileges the acquisition of wisdom over the carrying out of punishment.

If you’ve ever participated in a blameless post-mortem, you’ve already experienced that model of accountability. In a post-mortem, the aim is to unearth what happened—the story—without passing judgment on or retaliating against any of the characters within it. The explicit freedom from retribution is what makes it possible for people to speak openly and honestly of an event. If I can speak candidly about how I fucked up, knowing no harm will come to me, I am more able to admit my mistakes, learn from them, and commit to making whatever repairs may be necessary to recover from the harm. Paradoxically, it’s the lack of blame that creates the possibilities of repair and insight, while the threat of punishment forecloses opportunities for both.

If you’re thinking, that’s great, but if I miss my deadline this quarter, I know I’m finished—you’re not alone. For many reasons, the practice of accountability as storytelling hasn’t reached into other ceremonies, nor is it routinely present in leadership levels. We’re still stuck in the carceral model of accountability, with all its attendant expectations of punishment and suffering, and a lot of people are very reasonably still concerned about accepting even the premise of future punishment (whatever the near term rewards might be).

If we want to make accountability something people are grateful to accept rather than eager to pass on, then we’re going to have to shift our mindset and practices towards storytelling and away from retribution. Maybe you can’t change your boss’s or your boss’s boss’s thinking on this, at least not overnight. But you can start to practice the kind of accountability you want to partake in, you can work to bring that future a little closer to hand.

As with most change, it begins at home. The first step in practicing a more just accountability is to practice it with yourself. After all, if you can’t hold back from judging yourself, you’re unlikely to do so with others. So to get started, you can refrain from the demeaning self-talk the next time you do something that, in hindsight, looks like an error. Instead, you can practice asking questions like, what was I thinking and noticing when this happened? How did I respond to what I saw happening? What did I expect? How did I see myself at that moment? The point here isn’t to figure out what went wrong so you can avoid making the same mistake again. The point is to understand how the choices, decisions, and actions made sense at that time.

Then, you can share what you learn with your peers. You can model those storytelling skills with others. You can invite them to practice with you, and turn your newfound skills of inquiry outward. It may seem like such a small thing to do, but—as adrienne maree brown likes to say—change is fractal. Small changes beget bigger changes. If you cultivate a new way of thinking about accountability with yourself and then share it—if you give it away—you may find it leads to bigger changes above and around you. If you model a different way of being accountable, you give others the ability to think with and explore that kind of accountability, too. That’s the nature of a gift: it opens space between the giver and the receiver that wasn’t there before.

And maybe, when it comes back to that question—do you want to take on all that extra accountability?—maybe the answer is yes. Maybe there’s a chance here to change what that means, to model and grow a form of accountability that acknowledges we are all flawed human beings but we have the wondrous capacity to learn. You will come up against some headwinds, of course. Change is constant but it’s rarely easy. And maybe this opportunity isn’t the right one to set your shoulder against, perhaps there are others out there beckoning. But whatever the role, you have a story to tell—a story full of fuckups and hard times and achievements unlocked and enough lessons for several lifetimes. Don’t keep it all to yourself.