I am swimming against the tide, I know, I know. I know that the last time I talked about this people wrote to me and thanked me for helping cure their otherwise incurable insomnia but, gods, this stuff is important. The way we use language and think about things is important.

This week: accountability, responsibility, shit policy and death of the author.

Responsible and accountable are not the same thing.

The current trend of people claiming that they must ‘hold themselves accountable’ can be traced to humanist thinkers like Sartre and Camus. Once upon a time, only God could judge me: and then the Second World War happened and we killed God. It leads to a problem: to whom are we accountable?

Who is going to review our account and decide if it was a life well-lived?

Accountable to someone implies submission to the judgement of another, and there is something in that idea that makes us uncomfortable. I think it’s tied to the modern, hip, I-call-my-boss-Jim-because-we’re-just-people kind of a environment that I think is Bad, Actually. The way we hold our friends accountable should not be the same way that we hold our line reports accountable. It’s such a wildly different dynamic that I find it unsettling to see people refer to their managers by their first names. We’re not friends, y’all. You should not be friends with your manager. Be friendly, but don’t be friends, because the emotional whiplash you get when your ‘friend’ fires you because their boss needs a 20% reduction in costs will completely fuck you up. I’m serious! I know! I want to be a fun guy but this is serious, actually!

There’s my first thing. I am accountable to someone more senior, and their job is to judge and review and assure my decisions. They should be capable of doing that. They should be able to say whether or not my decision was a good decision. That’s holding me to account.

What are they responsible for?

Here I’m slightly diverting from what I think is common understanding. This idea has been common to most of my work from when I started working and it is this: my sphere of responsibility does not include my line report’s sphere of responsibility. At Netflix this is (was? I can’t find a blog post I’m sure existed) called the directly responsible individual. In other contexts, this process might be called the ‘advice process‘ for making decisions.

The things they are responsible for are things that only they are responsible for. They can ask for advice. They can expect to be challenged on their decisions. If they’re going to be effective they should, as Amazon says, be right a lot. My responsibility as a manager is to make sure they are responsible for things that they can actually achieve, and that I give them all of the context and support I can to help them achieve those things.

I think this divulges from mainstream thinking because most people seem to use ‘responsible’ to mean ‘accountable’ and ‘responsible’, and this means our mental model for these separate domains becomes muddled. We get managers who re-write a paper from a junior member of staff on the basis that ‘it’s quicker if I do it’ – ignoring how deeply disempowering it is and also that it is not their job. They are not responsible for the paper or the decision, in my mind. They’re accountable and it can be frustrating to be accountable and not responsible, but that’s the nature of the job.

Sometimes I think management training should require being moved to a completely different domain – but then, unfortunately, you lose the first half of the point which is accountability. I can’t hold someone accountable for a decision when I myself do not know if it was a good decision.

Unless I have a policy, and I can say that they have breached the policy.

This is neither accountability nor responsibility – at least as I know it. It is an accountability sink, as defined by Dan Davies. Nobody has to actually own a decision, or pass judgement on whether an individual has done something. You need only know that It Is Written. This ends up disempowering us all over the place. We end up asking the oracle of Policy whether we can do x or y. ‘The policy says’ is my least favourite phrase, and it’s fast becoming other people’s least favourite phrase to say to me – because my follow-ups are three-fold.

1. Where does it say that?
2. Who owns this policy?
3. Who can change it?

Policy does not arrive to us on tablets of stone from on high. If we own it, we can change it, and if we don’t own it we can find out who does.

We are not powerless. We have responsibilites and we have accountabilities and one of them, to circle all the way back, is to ourselves: and to judge for ourselves whether our actions are good.