Member-only story
You know, I’ve long been fascinated by how “compassion” fits into the general idea of work — I even blogged about the intersection point of compassion and profits years ago. At the same time, I’m fascinated by what “accountability” means to different people, because to a lot of managers I’ve observed, it seems to just mean “a tactic for scaring people.” I think it’s supposed to mean a healthy mix of discipline, autonomy, responsibility, coaching, guidance, and course-correction … but often it just means “screaming at a peon.”
So today on Harvard Business Review, there’s this article about how accountability and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Personally, I agree with that, but I’m also this very weird early-40s male that thinks about work a lot in different ways and has no true purpose and is currently wearing gym shorts at a WeWork, so who am I, really? This is in a huge bucket of articles where the author (in this case Amy Gallo) says something utterly logical, that any manager should already know, but when you look at the words being used, you realize most managers would never do any of the things mentioned in this article. Here’s an example:
You may be able to “extract labor” from people in the short term, says Dutton, but over the long term, it has the opposite effect. In other words, coming down hard on people…
