Accountability is a leadership discipline that enables and empowers an organization and its stakeholders to come together around a common purpose. It requires regular accountings as to where an organization is and it’s not effective at meeting stakeholder needs, but it isn’t the work of the organization. The goal for every leader is to insert the accountability function into the DNA of the organization.  As such, real accountability is neither a program nor an initiative, but rather mindset accompanied by a set of frameworks.

Our position on this is unequivocal—an environment with new leaders or new leadership represents an ideal position from which to do this work. Accountability is the most powerful organizational force in any organization and will create directional forces that will guide the organization towards its future. Accountability doesn’t negate the other components necessary to create coherent leadership team (that isn’t its purpose), but it can help create the necessary environment for those components to quickly thrive.

The accounting or accountability function in an organization represents the capacity an organization needs to indicate clearly where it is effective and where it is not yet as effective as it needs to be. The accountability function is therefore neutral when it comes to the content of an organization. Strategic plans represent one content component that will require a rich accountability function for them to be more than a series of tasks and metrics. Our experience suggests that the most traditional of strategic plans often need to be rethought once a benefits based accountability system is in place but that the opposite is not true. Schools that build a benefits-based accountability system first experience a much shorter timeline when doing their strategic work, as well as increased coherence across the entire system regarding their priorities and what needs to be accomplished.

If your organization is like most schools and districts we have worked with the answer is quite nicely. Remember that our benefits based accountability system is not an initiative or program, but rather, the mindset and frameworks regarding how best to account for those things. One of the most powerful moments in the process is when a school system can view all its strategic efforts, programs, and initiatives, through a coherence lens and see for the first time how everything fits or doesn’t fit together. Think of accountability as the glue that holds everything else together with a surprisingly small amount of effort.

You can. Schools are unique in the universe in how accountability has been done to us and as a result we’ve become conditioned to think of accountability as a massive undertaking that sucks up considerable time and effort on a daily basis. But real accountability is part of an organization’s DNA regarding how it understands and communicates its effectiveness to a variety of audiences. Real accountability is as natural to an organization as breathing is to a person.