I was having a conversation the other day about responsibility, accountability, and authority.

Accountability seems to be the term that people struggle with the most, because it feels like it’s nothing but bad consequences. If everything goes right, then we look for people to credit. If things go wrong, then we look for who’s accountable.

Who to blame.

So maybe it’s the wrong term to use in many cases. It doesn’t help get people motivated – except to look for where to hide. Or who else could shoulder the blame. Both of which aren’t useful or productive.

Let’s go back to what we were trying to achieve.

Usually when we want someone to be accountable, we want them to worry about problems, to take action, and to do their absolute best to make sure we get the results we agreed to. In many cases an appropriate word is “ownership” or perhaps “responsibility”. Both of those terms sound like you’re giving the person more tools to address issues, and more authority.

The RACI model (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) is quite useful to make distinctions about who does what in a group. But I’ve found that people often stumble over the distinction between Responsible and Accountable. In a corporate environment I’ve often seen that Responsible is the person who actually DOES or LEADS the work, and Accountable is their boss or stakeholder or person with the purse strings. There are times where things really don’t work this way.

If you want to use the word “accountable” to describe someone’s relationship to achieving goals, great. Just be prepared to say more about what the upside and opportunity is in this role, and how much decision-making authority they’re being granted.

At the end of the day, you want everybody motivated to do great work and achieve your goals.