Balance Accountability with Responsibility

While you are accountable for many things, don’t feel responsible for doing them all.

This week I attended a workshop filled with mid-level managers who have a plethora of “dotted-line” direct reports. Specifically, they have the accountability for performance reviews of reports who do not actually work for them. Therefore, the manager must collect performance data from the other manager and from peers of the individual for whom they must provide a performance review.

Yes, I agree, a poor set up.

In this workshop, the participants developed a complex set of questions and mechanisms to get comprehensive feedback, complete with general scores and specific examples to share with their pseudo reports. It dawned on me—why are we making the manager responsible for these measures and examples? Why not put the responsibility for the report to collect, summarize and defend their evaluation? Wouldn’t it be easier to set parameters for the to be collected than to collect it all for ourselves for each person?

Stay tuned as I think of those parameters and questions to be asked….