3 Strategies to Add Accountability to Your Decision-making
Accountability requires intentionality.
Organizations yearn for accountability in their implementation of DEI approaches but often are not sure how to create it.
Getting Unstuck
For some time, I have been thinking about accountability and its connection to racial equity as a practice. This is a place where so many organizations get stuck. Let’s use a concrete example. Organization A decides to use the Racial Equity Impact Analysis Tool when making any policy recommendations. The sticky place becomes how that organization holds itself accountable for the change in practice.
Staying with our tool example, let’s define accountability.
Accountability: The ways in which organizations hold themselves to their goals and actions while acknowledging the values and communities to which they are responsible. Accountability needs its own plan and approach. According to Dr. Evelyn Carter’s work, DEI Initiatives Are Futile Without Accountability, “without a framework for measuring and evaluating their efforts, the resolve that many leaders and organizations have shown around improving DEI in recent years will falter when challenges arise.” That means, that when an organization changes a practice, it must also create an accountability strategy at the same time. Organization A begins conducting a racial equity impact analysis on its policy recommendations, as a practice.
Here is some additional guidance. You can create an accountability strategy in three parts.
Part 1: Create a consistent “equity why.”
Organization A establishes a clear why for the practice change.
Part 2: Keep organizational or team commitments
Organization A holds the policy director accountable for conducting the analysis across program areas as well as supporting staff as they grow their capacity.
Part 3: Maintain transparency in decision-making.
Everyone on the team understands how the decision was made.
Make it stand out
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Work From A Consistent Why
Accountability is a “how question”, but before getting there, you need a shared why. By why, I mean why racial equity work matters to your organization, company, or philanthropy. Tools — even great ones (like the Racial Equity Impact Analysis Tool) — can't create an organizational why. The why is a shared organizational understanding and can only be created together. The starting place for a consistent “why” is your organization’s mission and vision.
The "how" is not likely to be applied if the "why" is not clear.
- Jill Schwartz, World Trade Center Institute
Keep Organizational/Team Commitments
Circling back to the earlier example, using the Racial Equity Impact Analysis Tool for policy is an organizational commitment. One way to keep this commitment is to add the tool to your organization's existing process. It starts with how policy recommendations are made. The answer to this question should include both people and processes. Creating an accountability plan requires a realistic view of power and its connection to consequences. In this context, organizations and leaders within them have positional power to keep commitments. Now, willingness is a different story, but power — yes. Use it.
Accountability is often viewed through a lens of punishment, e.g., what happens when you don’t do something. Today, we have the opportunity to reframe it by moving away from reporting and moving toward accountability planning as concrete action.
Maintain Transparency in Decision-making
Transparency in decision-making is critical to equitable practices taking hold inside of organizations and within teams. In this sense, transparency means clearly outlined, openly communicated decision-making processes. It’s in the “how” of how decisions are reached. Now, let's unpack this a bit more. It's been my experience that people often confuse equity in decision-making with equality in decision-making.
The difference is that equity in decision-making recognizes that people are situated differently, while equality in decision-making positions everyone's opinion or everyone's feedback as carrying the same weight. In most organizations, not every person has an equal say in decisions.
Some decisions are strictly made by a leadership team, an executive director, or a president.
The challenge and the opportunity for leaders in creating transparent decision-making is two-fold:
Be honest when there is an opportunity for feedback and when there is not; and
Accept that staff may not like your decisions.
Create an Accountability Plan
Identify the function area where accountability is needed.
Then, answer the three questions below.
1. What: To uphold what values to what communities (e.g., spaces)?
2. Who: Who is being held accountable to uphold what commitment?
2. How: In which decisions (e.g., how were decisions made)?
Accountability can be a murky concept because we don’t often share the same understanding of its meaning. Apply these strategies to your next organizational or team decision to create an accountability structure for your team.
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