Accountability vs Responsibility: What’s the Difference?

Accountability Vs Responsibility

Consider a time when everyone at your company was working toward a big goal that required cross-functional collaboration. Perhaps you were rolling out a new product, undergoing a rebrand, or expanding into a new geographic area or market segment. Each team member has their own responsibilities and deadlines in order to meet the company goal.

Let’s focus on how to get from the first and second to the third. You are the business owner, and you run an international excursion Accountability Vs Responsibility booking agency. When COVID-19 hits the world, you face new challenges because travel requirements start to change daily.

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Responsibility is divided among roles and often defines job descriptions and policies or procedures that are in place to achieve an end result. If someone fails at their responsibility, it may impact the success of the final outcome, but it likely isn’t the determining factor. Taking responsibility in the workplace is essential to your team’s success.

What is difference between responsibility and accountability?

While responsibility refers to someone's duty to carry out a task to completion, accountability generally refers to what happens after something has happened. Accountability is therefore concerned with the consequences of someone's actions, rather than their initial duty to carry these actions out.

First, you will end up with a list three pages long because it contains everything you need to do, plus checking up on what everyone else should be doing. This includes stepping in sometimes and just doing it because it was missed. Second, things seem to be falling through the cracks, not getting done or mistakes being made. Third, everyone knows what they should be doing, how they should be doing it and since they are taking ownership of it they are even improving on it.

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It is how you respond and accept ownership of the results. Although the difference between accountability and responsibility is often blurred, they hold very key distinctions. It is in understanding https://quick-bookkeeping.net/ these differences that you will be able to ensure that the right people are assigned to particular tasks and which people will be held accountable for the results generated.

When individuals, teams, and organizations chose greater accountability, you’ll see and get more. As you do so, you’ll see that the strategy for success is accelerated, and productivity and creativity will soar. In leadership, responsibility and accountability are both crucial aspects of a well-rounded leader, but what’s the difference? These two terms are almost always confused, interchanged and usually poorly understood. In today’s post, we’re breaking down the differences and similarities between the two terms. So, in order for one person to be both accountable and responsible, they would need to have both the authority to make decisions and be responsible for carrying them out.