Principles

When important work is left undone, management often quickly concludes that someone new needs to be hired.

Someone needs to lead sales.

Someone needs to fix the customer experience.

Someone needs to keep an eye on projects.

Someone needs to take responsibility for processes.

Someone needs to take some of the workload off the leader.

All these needs may be real.

But they do not yet prove that the company needs a new person.

The necessary work may already be divided among existing employees, while no one clearly owns the overall outcome.

Everyone is doing something.

No one is accountable for whether the outcome is ultimately achieved.

In that case, a new person may not increase the company's capabilities. They add yet another coordinator between the people already there.

The problem is not the number of people.

The problem is how accountability is structured.

Performing an activity and being accountable for the outcome are not the same thing

Many people in a company may contribute to a single outcome.

Marketing generates leads.

Sales meets with the customer.

Delivery proposes a solution.

Finance checks the price.

The leader approves the exception.

Everyone performs their own task.

But who is accountable for ensuring that the right customer reaches a profitable deal within a reasonable time?

If the answer is “all of us,” then probably no one is accountable.

Shared contribution does not mean shared accountability.

Accountability means that one person:

• knows what outcome must be achieved;
• monitors whether the outcome is moving in the right direction;
• notices when work gets stuck between departments;
• can make or initiate the necessary decisions;
• brings the problem to management at the right time;
• is accountable for ensuring that the outcome is not simply left unachieved.

They do not have to do all the work themselves.

They must ensure that all the work delivers the agreed outcome.

A new person is often hired to fill an accountability gap

In some companies, the workload does not arise because there are too few people to do the work, but because no one is making decisions that affect the whole.

Many specialists participate in projects, but no one sets priorities.

Several people work on sales, but no one is accountable for whether the sales model works.

Every department affects the customer experience, but no one has the authority to fix a recurring problem across the entire process.

Management sees the confusion and creates a new position.

A project manager, operations manager, customer experience manager, or coordinator is hired.

The new person starts gathering information, arranging meetings, and reminding others of their tasks.

They become a connecting layer between people.

If they are not given decision-making authority and clear accountability for an outcome, they do not resolve the accountability gap.

They manage it.

A coordination problem should not always be solved with a coordinator

When work moves poorly between people, hiring a coordinator seems logical.

But first, you need to ask why so much coordination is necessary.

Are the boundaries between roles unclear?

Does the same decision require approval from too many people?

Have the inputs and outputs of the work not been agreed?

Do departments have conflicting goals?

Do people not know who owns the problem?

Does management change priorities without closing out earlier decisions?

If the problem lies in how the work is designed, a new coordinator will have to spend every day resolving confusion created by the system.

They do not reduce the need for coordination.

The company simply pays someone to keep a poor setup working.

A good allocation of accountability reduces the need for coordination.

People know which outcome they own, which decisions they may make, and when the work must move to the next person.

The phrase “someone should deal with this” signals a lack of accountability

The following sentences often recur in management meetings:

“Someone should review our customer journey.”

“Someone should get our processes in order.”

“Someone should monitor the sales figures every week.”

“Someone should look into why projects are late.”

If the same issue repeatedly reaches the meeting, the company may not be missing someone capable of doing the necessary work.

What may be missing is a decision about whose outcome it is.

The word “someone” is a warning sign in an organization.

It means the problem is visible, but no owner has been assigned.

A task can be assigned to someone in a meeting. Accountability only emerges when that person knows which ongoing outcome they must sustain and has the authority to influence how work is organized in pursuit of it.

A leader may need a new allocation of accountability, not an assistant

When a leader is overloaded, hiring an assistant or another manager seems sensible.

Sometimes it is.

But first, you need to examine what the leader's workload consists of.

Are they doing a lot of administrative work that someone else could do more efficiently?

Or do all decisions reach them because the existing employees lack clear decision-making authority?

If the leader approves prices, priorities, holidays, customer exceptions, work tools, communications, and project details, a new assistant will not solve the problem.

They will help the leader manage the queue of decisions.

The bottleneck remains.

What genuinely reduces the leader's workload is transferring accountability for complete outcomes, together with decision-making authority, to other people.

This means the leader does not delegate only the activity.

They also delegate the right to choose how the outcome is achieved.

A lack of accountability looks like a lack of workforce

When no one is accountable for the whole, a great deal of extra work is created.

People ask for approvals.

The same information is discussed in several meetings.

Problems move from one person to another.

Activities are duplicated.

As deadlines approach, leaders have to intervene.

The workload grows, and the company concludes that it needs more people.

But some of this work exists only because accountability is unclear.

Once the decision-maker and accountable owner are clear, the following may disappear:

• some meetings;
• several rounds of approval;
• duplicate checks;
• chasing tasks;
• operational intervention by leaders;
• repeated discussion of the same problem;
• redistribution of work between people.

Clear accountability does not only make decision-making faster.

It removes work from the company that should not be necessary at all.

One outcome needs one clear owner

Dozens of people may contribute to an outcome.

But it must have one overall owner.

This does not mean the owner can command others or controls all the work.

It means their accountability does not end with the statement, “I did my part.”

If the outcome is not achieved, they must:

• understand where the work broke down;
• involve the necessary people;
• initiate a decision;
• escalate the conflict to the right level;
• fix the recurring problem;
• keep the outcome visible to management.

The owner of an outcome is not automatically the person with the most senior title.

It should be someone who is close enough to the outcome, understands the work that affects it, and can make the necessary decisions.

If the owner is too far removed from the work, accountability turns into reporting.

If they lack decision-making authority, accountability turns into relaying problems.

Accountability cannot be assigned without decision-making authority

Companies often tell people that they need to take more responsibility.

At the same time, they must coordinate every important decision with their leader.

That is not giving someone accountability.

It is making them answerable for an outcome without giving them the ability to steer it.

If someone is accountable for the customer experience, they must be able to influence at least some of the sales promises, the service process, and how recurring problems are resolved.

If someone is accountable for a project deadline, they must be able to influence the scope of work, priorities, and resources.

If they are accountable for a team's outcome, they must have the authority to give feedback, change the division of work, and make proposals about people's roles.

Accountability must always include three elements:

1. A clear outcome.

1. The authority to make the decisions necessary for that outcome.

1. Access to the necessary information and resources.

If any of these are missing, the person is being assigned the role of scapegoat rather than accountability.

Assigning accountability does not mean pushing all the work onto one person

There is also an opposite mistake.

A leader appoints someone accountable for the outcome and assumes that this person must now perform all the related activities themselves.

This quickly turns the accountable person into a bottleneck.

Accountability does not mean that the person:

• does all the work themselves;
• checks every detail;
• attends every meeting;
• resolves every exception;
• manually gathers all the information;
• is accountable for others without their cooperation.

Their task is to steer the outcome through the system.

This means allocating work to the right people, initiating decisions, removing obstacles, and keeping the necessary information visible.

If all the work piles up on one person's desk after accountability is assigned, the company has not created accountability.

It has created a new bottleneck.

New accountability cannot simply be added on top of existing work

Companies often identify an existing high performer and give them new accountability.

They know the company, work well with people, and solve problems.

Adding new accountability seems cheaper and faster than hiring.

But if their existing work is not reduced, the company gains no new capability.

The person must steer the new outcome alongside their old work.

At first, they do so through extra effort. After a while, either the old or the new accountability starts to suffer.

Management may then conclude that the person could not handle the larger role.

In reality, no room was made for them to carry it.

When assigning new accountability, you must also decide:

• which existing work will be stopped;
• which activity will be assigned to someone else;
• which meetings the person no longer needs;
• which decision-making authority moves with them;
• whether the role and compensation match the new accountability;
• what support they need during the transition.

Accountability cannot be piled endlessly onto a high performer's working day.

Reallocating accountability can reveal whether a new person is genuinely needed

Before hiring, a company can run a small experiment.

Assign an existing employee a clear overall outcome, give them the necessary decision-making authority, and remove some of their old work.

Then see what happens.

If the outcome improves and the workload remains reasonable, a new employee may not have been necessary.

What was missing was an owner of the outcome.

If the outcome becomes clearer but the workload still exceeds the existing team's capacity, the hiring need is now much more precise.

The company knows:

• what work is genuinely missing;
• what expertise is needed;
• which part of the accountability remains with the existing owner;
• which outcome the new person will be accountable for;
• what economic value the new role creates.

This way, a person is not hired into general confusion.

Specific capability is added.

When is a new person still needed?

Reallocating accountability does not solve every problem.

A new person is justified when:

• the required workload permanently exceeds existing capacity;
• the company lacks essential expertise;
• a new function needs a full-time owner;
• reallocating an existing person's work would create a critical gap elsewhere;
• the outcome creates enough value for a separate role to be economically justified;
• the existing employees are not suited to carrying that accountability;
• the next phase of growth requires a capability that the current team cannot build within a reasonable time;
• before hiring, the work has been eliminated, simplified, and clearly defined.

Hiring a new person is the right decision when the company knows exactly what capability it is adding.

“We have a lot of work” is not yet a sufficient reason.

“We need someone who takes full accountability for customer onboarding and cuts time to value in half” is already a clear role.

When does the situation indicate a need for new accountability?

A new person may not be needed when:

• existing employees have the necessary expertise and spare capacity;
• several people contribute to the same outcome, but there is no owner;
• problems arise mainly between roles;
• a large part of the work consists of coordination and seeking approvals;
• the leader constantly resolves issues that could be decided closer to the work;
• the work gets done, but no one monitors its overall outcome;
• the same issue repeatedly reaches the management meeting;
• the new person's main task would be chasing existing employees;
• the company cannot articulate what new business outcome the new role would create;
• the problem would be reduced by clear decision-making authority rather than greater capacity.

In this situation, the accountability map should be reviewed before publishing a job advertisement.

How should new accountability be defined?

New accountability should not be a vague wish for someone to “take ownership of the issue.”

It must give the person clear operating parameters.

Outcome

What measurable change must occur as a result of their accountability?

Scope

Which part of the whole belongs to them, and which does not?

Decision-making authority

Which decisions may they make independently?

Resources

Which people, budget, information, and tools can they use to influence the outcome?

Dependencies

Whose work must function for their outcome to be achieved, and how will conflicts be resolved?

Metrics

Which few indicators show whether the outcome is improving?

Escalation

In what circumstances must they escalate the problem to the next level?

Work to be relinquished

Which previous accountability or activity will they give up because of the new role?

If these questions remain unanswered, the accountability has not truly been defined.

The person has simply been given a new issue to deal with.

Accountability must follow value creation, not job titles

Accountability is often allocated according to the existing structure.

Sales is accountable for everything before the contract.

Delivery for everything after the contract.

Finance for invoices.

Customer support for problems.

But the customer's outcome moves through all these areas.

If accountability ends at a departmental boundary, everyone can do their own work correctly and the customer can still receive a poor outcome.

That is why the company's value stream must be examined from beginning to end.

Who is accountable for ensuring that:

• the right customer reaches the company;
• the right promise moves from sales to delivery;
• the customer achieves the desired outcome;
• a recurring problem feeds back into process improvement;
• completed work turns into revenue;
• the customer stays and buys again?

These accountabilities may not fit perfectly within traditional job titles.

But the company's structure must support value creation, not just the organizational chart.

More people do not automatically create more accountability

A company may hire more people only to discover that decisions have become slower.

Each new role creates more handoffs, approvals, and opportunities to assume that someone else is handling the matter.

If the logic of accountability remains unclear, a larger team disperses accountability even further.

A new person may bring important expertise and capability into the company.

But they do not automatically answer the question of who owns the outcome.

Management must make that decision before hiring.

Otherwise, the company gains an employee but not an owner of the outcome.

Before publishing the next job advertisement, it is therefore worth asking:

Are we genuinely missing a person to do the necessary work?

Or are we missing a person who clearly owns the outcome of the work already being done?

The first problem requires hiring.

The second requires a management decision.

Mikk Orglaan

Challeng.ist