Introduction
Some of my former colleagues are still traumatized by actions of egregious discrimination and abuse perpetrated by those who hold positions of power. Others recall acts of astonishing insensitivity and bewildering refusals to act in response to access requests to avert impending injury. Former colleagues have had to resort to workers compensation claims for psychological injuries caused by such insensitivity – and breach of the organization’s obligations. Never once has the person responsible been known to have been required to account for their conduct.
A former colleague and friend who had experienced an extraordinary degree of discrimination because of their disability was horrified when I sent them a draft of this post – now completely rewritten – because I argued that accountability begins with us all. Yes, abusive leaders should have been held responsible for what they did. But they weren’t – and that reality still causes very real distress. I wish it were otherwise.
If we are ever to ensure accountability is an inviolable core value in any organization we must understand why it is so hard to make it real.
If we want equity and inclusion, we need a culture of accountability that enables self-correction at an organizational level. Those at the bottom of the power pyramid cannot passively stand by and demand those at the top model what they want – even though they really should be doing so.
Accountability can’t live in one part of an organization’s culture and not elsewhere. It must be manifested as universally as possible. As social creatures we tend to conform to norms – so to make accountability the norm to which others will conform we must begin with ourselves. This does not excuse past wrongs. But creating a culture that honors accountability might lead to reflective self-awareness by perpetrators and those who looked the other way. Well, to be honest, I don’t hold out much hope for that. But we must start somewhere.
My purpose here is to support the reader who might be frustrated or distressed by those who talk accountability for discriminatory actions but do not convert words to deeds. Learn to understand why this happens, and then you can formulate an effective response.
We don’t do accountability well as a culture. I think this is because we have a culturally ingrained reflex to see accountability as a punitive response.
I grew up in a time when getting a hiding from one’s parents or teacher was acceptable. Those whose role it was to love and guide us thought inflicting pain was the right and good thing to do in service of guiding our behaviour. No wonder we don’t like being held to an account – if it means pain or shame.
There are fundamental psychological difficulties as well. We are more lenient on our in-group members and tougher on members of out-groups. I learned this lesson a few decades ago in a stark and powerful way
A few decades ago, I was urged to run for the role of chair of a community board responsible for managing a funded community service. I was urged to do so by the service’s staff who were distressed by the behaviour of their manager. They had been complaining about him to the board for months. The manager sat in on board meetings, so the staff were perplexed that nothing had happened.
At my first board meeting, as chair, I ensured the manager would not attend and asked the board why it had not acted in response to complaints from staff. There was a pause and one member spoke up. They had talked about it privately. They felt that taking action against the manager would be an act of disloyalty. Of the 12 members of the board 9 were managers in their own right in small businesses in the community. They understood how hard it was to be a manager so they couldn’t punish this guy. So they did nothing.
This is a true story. It was the first time I had experienced in-group protection so starkly, but I had no language for it back then. It was just a stunning experience I filed away for later. Now I look back and realise that punishment was the only option to the board. These were blokes in a country town, and they couldn’t imagine acting in a caring or nurturing way in this scenario.
The big problem with striving for inclusiveness for any ERG is what to do when one’s organization, despite avowing zero tolerance for abusive behaviour is utterly unmoved when one of its managers or executives is implicated in bullying or discriminating against a staff member who is a member of a ‘diversity group’.
How do we transform inaction into meaningful, effective and accountable action?
How should we respond?
For reasons noted above accountability is a complex matter – especially when it is seemingly absent. We must respond with insight, patience and respect. Self-righteous anger, or frustration, can muddy the message and lead to push back.
Accountability can become a chorus line repeated by people who know it is a good thing, but who haven’t yet found the need to look deeper into how it may happen. Nothing is more counterproductive than talking at cross purposes and with emotional heat on a matter everyone essentially agrees upon.
In my union delegate days, I was often dismayed when my comrades misread the intent of management representatives and generated conflict when there was no need at all. We can come out fighting from our corner when the other party wants to parlay, but we don’t yet have a shared language. And the reverse is also true. We want to talk but are met with defensiveness and anticipatory retaliation. Same problem – no shared language crafted from mutual understanding and trust.
The creation of a cultural climate in which mutual understanding and trust is necessary before anything else about accountability can change.
Making accountability a person-centred thing
There will be times when a punitive response to an accountability issue is warranted. Maybe it is the only thing to do. Being responsible for such an action is tough enough, especially if the individual in question is a member of one’s in-group.
If an organization openly says inclusivity is a core value but does not respond when a leader does not uphold that value it is easy for others to see that, despite the talk, it’s not really. Under these circumstances a punitive response is neither reasonable nor fair.
So, before we can muse on whether a failure to be fair, kind or inclusive merits a punitive response we need to address commitment to values at an organizational level.
With the exception of 5 years (1996 -2001) I worked in the NSW public service in 4 departments. The commitment to values has been generally strong but the failings I witnessed were stark – and unaccountable. This included an alleged rape of a subordinate staff member by an executive. It was unreported because there was no faith in the accountability process.
The current NSW public service asserts its core values. Here’s an excerpt:
“All NSW government sector employees are required and expected to act ethically, lawfully and in the public interest. This can be achieved by adhering to the government sector core values of Integrity, Trust, Accountability and Service.”
I am going to sound like a pedant here, but please bear with me. When I see wording like “(All) employees are required and expected to…” I wonder why anybody would approve such a contradiction in terms. Required brooks no exceptions. But expected does. We can see the echoes of expected everywhere.
The 2024 People Matter Employee Survey [PMES] showed that 81% of respondents had a favorable view of the sector’s ethics and values but 61% had an unfavorable assessment of leaders’ decision making and accountability. However, we must remember that the survey’s overall response rate was 51%. These numbers could conceal a deeper level of discontent.
I prefer to look at these figures a different way – as if people mattered. If 19%, nearly 1 in 5 staff, are not content with the sector’s ethics and values and only 40% (2 in 5) are content with leaders’ decision making and accountability a different picture emerges. The problem with PMES results is that there’s an openly declared ‘pass mark’. A score of 80% looks good until you see it in terms of people – 20% or 1 in 5 are discontent. Is that okay?
The survey ranks the score into 3 groups – 0-49%, 50% -74%, 75% -100%. The impression I get is that it is a bit like grading school work into fail, pass and credit. That doesn’t work for people, surely.
Generally speaking, the 2024 figures seem pretty good – only 14% experienced bullying, only 5% experienced sexual harassment [but that might be close to 10% of women], only 8% experienced discrimination [of what kind?], only 4% experienced racism [what portion of the workforce is likely to experience racism.?] But again, that’s only of the 51% of the sector who responded. Non-responses to surveys are for a variety of reasons – including disengagement and despair. Even among respondents the employee engagement score is only 62% positive (2 in 5 not feeling it)
The 2024 survey had only one key topic area (ethics and values) at over 75% (81%). That’s 1 of 20 key topic areas. There were 3 ‘fails’ – action on survey results (42%), pay (44%) and senior executives (48%).
I think the PMES deserves a deeper and more sophisticated assessment than a school mark approach. Official interpretations understandably are inclined to put a positive spin on the scores, but digging deeper is something we must do. What’s a pass mark when it comes to psychological wellbeing of staff?
The 2023 State of the NSW Public Sector Report shows that 13.2% of staff experienced bullying but only 25.5% of the 49.2% of staff who reported bullying were satisfied with the outcome of their complaint.
Let’s put that another way. Only half of the staff who say they experienced bullying reported it and of those who did 75% were unhappy with the outcome.
Some readers might object that not all perceptions of bullying are real. That’s true. But satisfaction with an outcome of a complaint is more about how it was handled than whether the complaint felt justified. Regardless, this is still a woeful number.
I am not picking on the NSW public sector here. There’s no reason to believe any other public sector is any different. I just happen to know the sector well. I also have extensive experience in complaints investigation.
Here’s an excerpt from the 2021 State of the NSW Public Sector report.
“As with other negative workplace behaviours, the numbers are low. However, any level of discrimination and racism is unacceptable, and we need to work together to ensure that everyone has a positive experience at work.” This is an entirely sensible statement, but I want to draw the reader’s attention to the word “unacceptable”.
It’s another soft articulation of a declaration of required behaviour.
Bullying has decreased from 29% in 2012 to 20% in 2016, and 18% in 2019. So, a score of 14% in 2024 can justifiably be seen as a significant improvement since 2012. That’s a 50% reduction in reported incidents over 12 years.
I am not critical of the NSW public sector, but I do want to point up a problem that is deeply entrenched in bureaucracies, organizational culture and individual behaviour.
It is that if you require a certain standard of behaviour as an expression of core values it isn’t okay to water down the language and change required behaviour to ‘expected’ and prohibited behaviour as ‘unacceptable’.
Saying behaviour is ‘unacceptable’ and that better behaviour is ‘expected’ is what we have heard as children from people who voice their disapproval and nothing else. There is a message that shaming a person for misconduct is enough. If we are powerless to act to hold a person to account, an expression of disapproval and frustration might be the best that we can muster.
Even if the younger generations don’t have similar experiences those attitudes are already baked into organizational culture and bureaucratic culture.
The data on bullying, even in 2024, shows that it is still happening to at least 1 in 10 people. Okay, let’s change that and imagine 100 colleagues. Now imagine 10 say they have been bullied, only 5 feel it was worthwhile drawing this to the attention of leaders, and only 1 later said they were satisfied with the outcome of their report.
Ask yourself how this fits with an organization’s assertion that accountability is a core value.
Here we have several problem areas. The first is when we reduce people to numbers. The NSW public sector can look at the rate of bullying and celebrate that the rate has halved since 2012. Or it can be horrified that still 13% of staff report being bullied, reporting rates are so poor, or that so few staff are happy with the outcome of their efforts to seek accountability. If accountability is genuinely a core value that number should be 0%.
There’s a fundamental difference between an aspiration and a core value. Accountability isn’t expressed as an aspiration. It’s what is on all the time. Can you imagine a public sector with integrity, trust and service being expressed as an aspiration? We want to get to the point where we act with integrity and can be trusted. I don’t think service is a core value, that’s just lazy thinking.
Core values are what we embody all the time and what others expect of us – all the time.
So why is it so hard?
Thinking a punitive reaction is the only response is ingrained in our cultural reflex – that’s one problem.
If we want a person to be held accountable for their actions but think a punitive response isn’t the right thing in any circumstance – that’s another problem.
If being punitive is easier and more satisfying than supporting, guiding or coaching a person whose behaviour is in need of correction – that’s another problem.
Add the in-group leniency and over-reaction to out-groups into the mix.
In short, we can paint ourselves into corners and become unresponsive and ineffectual because we confuse ourselves by mixing up core values and aspirations. I think the NSW core values are aspirations and its dishonest and misleading to claim otherwise. It’s as if the authors didn’t understand the distinction and those who approved the text weren’t aware there was a contradiction. It is fine to have aspirations, but not as a string of single words. Calling them ‘core values’ makes single words seem more potent. We are trapped by brevity and then confused.
Researchers into organizational behaviour and effective leadership say breaches of core values must be responded to with immediate and effective action that leaves no doubt that required behaviour is just that, not expected behaviour.
I am not suggesting a plan to fix problems related to accountability not being upheld. That’s a big thing to fix. What I want to do is stimulate reflective thinking on what we mean by accountability and what we expect – of ourselves, our colleagues and our organization.
The risk is that when we sense that accountability is lacking it is easy to become frustrated and disengaged. If we go this way our capacity to productively raise concerns about accountability will be impaired.
There are some important takeaways for ERG leaders here. They are:
- Accountability is a complex matter, so any attempt to engage one’s organization on the matter must be informed, nuanced and blame free.
- Nurture or coaching based accountability is initially preferable, unless the person in question is recalcitrant and irredeemably averse to changing their conduct. But commitment to remedial action to change behaviour must be present in all related parties.
- Be realistic about what you can achieve. But also be prepared to have a nuanced conversation with your executive leaders. Talking to executive sponsors and champions first is a good idea.
Conclusion
There is no doubt that the cause of inclusion and fairness in any organization is impaired if accountability is asserted to be a core value – and then there’s no follow through. There must be an agreement or protocol on how there can be effective and consequential follow through.
Issues of accountability arise in several key contexts:
- Egregious acts that require a formal response.
- Failures to act, or misguided action that are generated by unintentional action, including being exacerbated by stress. These can be dealt with in a supportive manner – as a learning or developmental opportunity or just some help – and no judgement.
Many ERGs will have terms of reference that prohibit direct intervention in incidents that give rise to demands a colleague or leader be held to account for their action or inaction. These are necessary limitations. But that doesn’t mean that discussion on, and negotiations about, how accountability works as a core value can’t or shouldn’t be engaged in. Neither does it mean that an ERG may not be supportive, acknowledging the pressure middle management is under to be across many complex demands. ERGs often have subject matter experts who could be supporting over-taxed middle managers.
Accountability is a fundamental value that informs who we are as individuals in our private lives, and how we behave as staff members as we add our personal dimension to the character of our organization’s culture.
It is the one core value that defines the organization and creates a climate in which ERGs can be effective contributors to achieving their agreed missions in partnership with the organizations. Partnerships with no functioning capacity for mutual accountability don’t work and can’t survive.
I will come back to this theme in coming months because talking on such a complex theme requires ideas that are well-developed and language that is comfortably employed. And it may take a bit to get there.