In my travels, it is clear that “personal accountability” is taking a hit in business.
Not only is management telling Cubicle Warriors to do things that question their integrity, but people are spending a lot of time simply covering up bad news.
A reader writes to me and tells me of a situation where developers told the rest of the team that they didn’t have time to fix this bug in this cycle, so they didn’t want it labeled as a bug. Why? Because they are rated for how many bugs come out of their development work. So if they can’t get to the bug because of workload, don’t label it a bug.
Hence, “that’s not a bug, it is a feature.”
If you can’t tell the truth to yourself, who can you tell truth to?
When you lie to yourself about your performance and what needs to be done, you don’t have a career. What you have is skating along and hoping no one makes you accountable for your work. After all, if you don’t have someone looking at your work and you aren’t accountable for your own work, you can make up anything you want. That might work for a while, but you won’t be fooling all of the people much of the time.
If you can’t tell truth to management, what does that tell you about management?
It means there isn’t much management going on in your department. Either because management isn’t watching what is going on in the group or management doesn’t want to know when bad things happen. In either case, when your team isn’t digging up their mud, you will pay for it later.
Cubicle Warriors want good goals in their work. Cubicle Warriors want their work group to be accountable for their own stuff – because it allows them to do their own work. Cubicle Warriors want to count on others to do their own work. Cubicle Warriors want to be able to speak truth to power because that is how problems get solved.
If you are in a group where “we can’t fix this, so it isn’t a bug” is prevalent, how good can you accomplish goals for your career? How can management manage if they aren’t holding people (including other managers) accountable for their work?
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