Imagine this scenario. You’ve been given a sales target by your boss. You have three direct reports. You tell each one where you’d like them to focus and set appropriate targets. All three leaders exceed their targets but your department misses its overall target. What rating do you give them on their performance review – fails to meet expectations, meets expectations, or exceeds expectations? This scenario came up during a recent discussion with a leadership group. Half of the group felt that the direct reports didn’t deserve anything above “meets” because the department failed to meet its goals. The other half felt that the direct reports deserved an “exceeds” rating since they exceeded the targets given to them and that the supervisor deserved a “does not meet” since he or she chose the wrong areas in which to focus. I tend to side with the second group. Departments don’t miss goals, people do. In this case the leader was accountable for the overall department’s goal His or her team was accountable for their assigned piece. Rolling the three direct reports into the department’s success creates an unfair and unrealistic level of accountability. You can’t hold people accountable for your decisions or the decisions of others. You should only hold them accountable for their own decisions and actions. I see this problem outside of the business world in the field of education. Teachers often have little input into the focus, curriculum, or policies of their school, yet are held accountable for the quality of learning in their classroom. Teachers should be accountable for their students’ achievement, but they should also be allowed to make the decisions as to how to best foster that achievement. The same is true of leaders and business decisions and results. It’s not fair to tell someone to do something and then penalize them because it wasn’t the right thing to do. A second area of misalignment in decision making and accountability often comes between corporate and business-facing functions of a company. This misalignment is a bit more tricky due to the often competing goals of the two parts of the business. Leaders in corporate departments need to look out for the welfare of the organization as a whole. Leaders in a specific business unit, while remembering they are part of a larger entity, are usually held accountable for their specific area’s results. Therein lies the problem. For example, consider a procurement director who creates a preferred vendor program (in order to reduce costs). Such a director might successfully lobby to require all leaders in the organization to only use vendors in the program. If preferred vendor usage increases and vendors costs decrease, the procurement director is rightfully rewarded. However, what if the new vendor program excludes a vendor (or set of vendors) who are uniquely qualified to help one of the business units and that unit’s performance slips? Does the procurement director, whose program excluded these critical vendors get held accountable? No, he or she is rewarded. The business unit’s leader is penalized because he or she is accountable for the performance of the unit. Corporate policy is important, but it’s unfair to hold someone accountable for actions that were dictated by someone who is accountable to a different set of goals and expectations. The last misalignment between decision making and accountability comes with data. Often departments that gather, process, and report data are not the departments that actually use the data. Standard reports while easier and more efficient for the reporting group aren’t always more effective for the leader who is trying to make a decision. Yet that second group of leaders are held accountable for the quality of decisions made using the standard reports. I’m often surprised at how hard it is for a front-line leader to get the data that he or she needs to run the business. Someone in a data department is making the decision about what data that leader “needs”, what data the leader can use, and the format in which that leader will receive it. There are important legal, ethical, and social reasons to safeguard certain data in an organization. However, when that safeguarding is so aggressive that it squelches any meaningful use of the data, the value of having the data in the first places ceases to exist. If you find yourself in the position of telling someone else what information, people, or resources he or she needs or what actions or investments he or she should be making, stop and step back. Ask yourself whether you will be held accountable if this leader’s performance slips in response to your requirement. If the answer is “yes”, continue on, you have every right to be involved. If the answer is “no”, reconsider your requests or actions. Is there a way to get your need met while enabling the other leader to make the actual decisions for which he or she will be held accountable? All leaders need to take time to assess the alignment between decisions and accountability. In an ideal world, people at all levels would only be held accountable for their decisions and actions. In a practical world, that can’t always happen. But, as leaders we can be more deliberate about whether we hold people accountable for executing our decisions and how far we step into other people’s business when we tell them what they need, when they need it, and what they have to do with it. Brad Kolar is the President of Kolar Associates, a leadership consulting and workforce productivity consulting firm.