Accountability: an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or to account for one's actions.
It’s that last segment in the definition that really get’s me. Is that accounting for some one else’s actions? Or just to account for your own? Or both? In my short time at the University of Chicago I have learned much about accountability and, to my surprise, I have not been happy with all of my findings.
Lets start with the bad: some people just have no sense of accountability. They would rather throw their best friend under the bus rather then get a pebble thrown at them from 25 feet away. I’ve seen this unaccountability everywhere from the classroom, to MoneyThink mentors, to the basketball referees at intramural games. Yes, even at the University of Chicago – where you would think that everyone would have at least some sense of accountability. It’s so disappointing when you hear of things like a Moneythink mentor, who has been assigned to go mentor one class for 45 minutes on a day when he or she has 5 hours free of schoolwork, work, working out, or whatever excuse they may come up with, and yet they still fail to show up to the class. Worse yet, they decide not to tell the organization that they will not be able to attend the class until 30 minutes before the class starts when it is almost impossible to mobilize another mentor to fill-in.
Yet it is these very situations that bring out that innate sense of accountability that some people have. Back to our situation, its 30 minutes before a classroom of high school students are eagerly waiting to be mentored in the MoneyThink financial literacy curriculum and one of our senior members gets an e-mail that no one will be able to cover that class. So he or she, the senior MoneyThink member, decides that they will miss their Calculus class in order to assure that 20 low-income students will not miss out on learning about the importance of opening up a savings account rather than spending that paycheck on a fresh, new pair of Nike’s.
It is those amazing moments, when a member of the team decides to drop everything that they have planned for themselves that day and step up and cover a class that they have not been mentoring for the sake of the organization. It is that kind of mentality that I love to see at MoneyThink – that none of us are bigger than the organization, that each and every one of us are accountable, not just to each other, but to ourselves. And when that drive to be accountable is coming from nowhere but inside and you are still getting the job done then you know that you are truly, in every sense of the word, accountable.
