Another Control Won't Fix an Accountability Problem

You’ve told them. You’ve explained why it matters. It’s in the procedure. It was covered at induction. You’ve raised it in toolbox talks. You’ve discussed it one-on-one.

It still isn’t happening.

Someone suggests a form. Someone else suggests a revised procedure. Somebody mentions refresher training.

For the love of God, not another form.

Sometimes the system genuinely is inadequate and needs to change. But sometimes the expectation was already perfectly clear. Adding another administrative control to the same failure doesn’t fix it. It merely gives the organisation another thing that can also not be done.

The problem isn’t controls themselves. It’s adding administrative layers when the failure had nothing to do with the adequacy of the existing control.

Before adding anything, diagnose the failure

Organisations gravitate towards process responses because they’re tangible, recordable and defensible. You can point to the revised procedure and demonstrate that action was taken. Addressing accountability is less comfortable because it requires someone to establish why the existing expectation wasn’t met and then respond accordingly.

Before changing the system, ask:

Was the expectation clear, and did they understand why it mattered?

Did they have what they needed to do it: capability, time, resources and authority?

Was it clearly someone’s responsibility?

Was anyone checking?

When it wasn’t done, what happened?

The first three questions test whether you’re looking at a genuine system, capability, resourcing or ownership problem. If those foundations are sound, the last two start pointing towards accountability.

These three levels can exist entirely on their own. An individual can ignore a clear expectation in an organisation that’s otherwise well-managed. Equally, they can stack: an unchecked individual failure can sit inside a manager who’s stopped verifying, inside a culture where verification isn’t welcome. Either way, the diagnosis starts at whichever level you can see.

Individual accountability: the expectation was clear. It still wasn’t followed.

The person knew what was required, was capable of doing it, had the resources and authority to do it, and didn’t.

The issue isn’t simply that non-compliance occurred. People make mistakes. The accountability problem appears when a failure that should be addressed receives no meaningful correction or consequence.

If someone can repeatedly ignore an existing requirement without anything happening, adding another requirement is unlikely to change their behaviour. A new form doesn’t solve an individual accountability problem. It gives the individual another form not to complete.

The response needs to address the behaviour itself: clear feedback, understanding why it occurred, resetting expectations where necessary, and, where the behaviour continues, appropriate performance or disciplinary action.

Managerial accountability: setting expectations isn’t the same as managing it

Sometimes the frontline behaviour is only half the problem. The manager communicated the expectation once and assumed that was enough. Nobody checked. Nobody followed up. When it wasn’t done, there was no conversation, correction or consequence.

Managers don’t discharge their responsibility simply by telling people what should happen. Particularly where the consequence of failure is significant, they need some reasonable means of knowing whether it is happening.

The response here isn’t another worker-level control. It requires better managerial follow-through: observing, verifying, asking, correcting and escalating where necessary.

Trust and verification aren’t opposites. Good people can still miss things, misunderstand things, take shortcuts or make poor decisions. Checking isn’t automatically an accusation of incompetence. In many circumstances, it’s simply management.

Organisational accountability: when nobody wants to check

What happens when managers themselves operate in an organisation where checking is seen as micromanagement or distrust?

“I trust my team” can become a reason not to verify. Managers who challenge repeated failures are seen as difficult. Problems are discussed but not pursued. Expectations hold only until enforcing them becomes uncomfortable, at which point everyone quietly learns where the real limit is.

At this point, changing the individual or even the manager may not solve the problem, because the behaviour is being reinforced by the organisation around them. It’s one reason the same failures can survive restructures, personnel changes, new procedures and repeated training.

The organisational response is harder because it requires senior leaders to examine what behaviour they actually reward, tolerate and follow through on, rather than what the policy says they expect.

Aim the response at the right level

You don’t necessarily control what the organisation ultimately decides to do. But you can improve the diagnosis you take into the room.

Instead of “people aren’t following the procedure, we need another control,” you can identify: is this a system problem, an individual accountability problem, a managerial accountability problem, or an organisational one? That diagnosis tells you who actually needs to act.

So next time it hasn’t been done, again, and someone reaches for a new form, stop them. Ask the five questions. Work out whether this is a system that’s broken, a person who’s decided the rules don’t apply to them, a manager who stopped watching, or an organisation that’s made watching feel rude.

Then go and fix that. For the love of God, let’s not create another form.

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By Maya Gazzard, Head of People & Systems, Trescon

Maya Gazzard leads People, Safety and Systems in construction. She believes a control, a process or a person only holds up if it’s true in practice, not just true on paper. That belief shapes how she works: directly, sometimes uncomfortably, but always in service of getting it right rather than getting it signed off.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mayagazzard/