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Leadership and Accountability

Leaders in an organization have to assume responsibility for the
performance of the people for whom they have responsibility. Harry
Truman had a sign on his desk that said, the buck stops here. This means
that leaders need to monitor their people’s progress, give them direction,

and hold them accountable.

Achieving balance between empowerment and accountability is not easy.
Unfortunately, “the empowerment stream can become a muddy creek in
no time,” leading to conflict, apathy, and/or the decrease in empowerment.
The concept of empowerment can be easily misunderstood and can be

poorly administered in organizations that ultimately mean well.
According to the World Bank, empowerment can be defined as the process
of increasing the assets and capabilities of individuals or groups to make purposive
choices and to transform those choices into desired actions and outcomes.
332
Accountability can be defined as being held answerable for outcomes.

The value of empowering employees includes the following:
• Because management cannot see everything that is going on in the
organization, they need help and lots of it.
• Because even if management could see everything, they would not
have enough time to fix everything on their own.
• Because we are wasting valuable experience and intelligence if we

don’t leverage the knowledge and creativity of the organization’s most
important resource, which is its people.
333

The failure to empower employees would be an unfortunate circumstance
that could drain organizational resources and leadership vitality. As

leaders are being developed in the organization, the effort should be made
to provide greater amounts of freedom simultaneous to ensuring the
appropriate levels of accountability. Empowerment without accountability
is likely to lead to organizational chaos.

332 http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTPOVERTY/EXTEMPOWERMENT/0,,cont
entMDK:20272299~pagePK:210058~piPK:210062~theSitePK:486411~isCURL:Y~isCURL:Y,00.html.
333 http://leanthinkingnetwork.org/2011/10/20/e2-2-empowerment-and-accountability/.

David Kolzow 302