Accountability seems such a reasonable thing until you get to the
practicalities of who is accountable to whom for what on whos terms and by
what means. When one starts to sort out these issues in many cases it
starts to get very complex and rather meaningless.
I see many situations where managers and politicians justify their power
in terms of their accountabilty, but when things go wrong their
accountability means nothing.
As for an employees accountabilty to a mssion, it think that would be very
difficult to make sense of in practice unless you have a very clear
mission, and others who see the mission in exactly the same way.
Perhaps I am rather cynical, but I see accountability as one of the big
put-ons of the current age.
Yours
Gray Southon
>Michael, you responded to my earlier post that accountability meant green
>eyeshades and ledgers to you. That is not my intent at all. What I am
>speaking of has nothing to do with numbers, but an expectation that
>employees and managers will be accountable to an organization's mission,
>values and core competencies and when they are not that there will be
>opportunities to correct that, and if those fail, then they can be asked
>to leave the organization. I don't think every organization is a fit for
>every employee.
>
>Debbie Broome
Gray Southon
Consultant in Health Management Research and Analysis
15 Parthenia St., Caringbah, NSW 2229, Australia
Ph/Fax +61 2 9524 7822, mobile +61 414 295 328
e-mail gsouthon@ozemail.com.au
Web Page: http://www.ozemail.com.au/~gsouthon/
--Gray Southon <gsouthon@ozemail.com.au>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>