reimagining accountability for better government
As the mother of two young children - (almost) 11 and 7 - accountability is something that my husband and I try to teach our kids. It is a big word for little people, so we have tried to find ways to simplify it for them.
We talk about being responsible for our actions and reactions to things. We talk about how being accountable also means being willing to own any consequences or repercussions that come from your actions and reactions. From this they have learned cause and effect.
It has been fascinating to watch my kids start to grasp this fundamental teaching. They of course test boundaries, take decisions that come with effects that they do not particularly like, learn what works for each of them and what does not. But in the process, they are learning how to exercise their judgment.
This journey with my children has made me reflect deeply on judgment and accountability in professional contexts, particularly within government, the context that I know so well. The same principles apply, yet the implementation often looks vastly different in institutional settings.
I recently read Dan Honig's Mission Driven Bureaucrats: Empowering People to Help Governments Do Better. In his book, Honig advocates for managing for empowerment. As an approach, it centers on trusting and enabling employees to use their own judgment and creativity. It involves giving employees the freedom to decide how best to carry out their work, while investing in their skills and confidence. This management style seeks to connect individual actions to the broader mission of the organization, so that staff not only understand the purpose behind their tasks but also feel motivated to contribute meaningfully to public outcomes.
This empowerment approach stands in stark contrast to managing for compliance, a style that Honig notes is too often relied upon in governments globally. Managing for compliance relies on strict controls, detailed rules, and rigorous monitoring. It uses targets and performance metrics to ensure that employees follow established procedures, often relying on external incentives such as rewards and sanctions. While this method can be effective in environments where activities are easily measured, it stifles innovation and reduces intrinsic motivation when applied to tasks that require discretion and nuanced judgment.
Honig argues that many public servants are inherently motivated by a desire to serve the public good, in fact, it is why many joined government in the first place. By drawing on empirical research and practical examples from around the world, Honig shows that when bureaucrats are given the freedom and support to exercise their judgment, they not only produce better outcomes but are also more likely to remain committed to their roles. As a result, overall government performance improves when governments are managing for empowerment.
What does managing for empowerment actually look like in practice? It means giving employees clarity about the mission and outcomes they're working toward, while allowing flexibility in how they achieve those outcomes. It means focusing performance conversations on impact rather than process adherence. Most importantly, it means creating psychological safety where employees can experiment, occasionally fail, learn, and improve without fear of punishment for reasonable risks taken in good faith.
In my experience within the Government of Canada, accountability to citizens somehow became the default explanation for compliance-focused management regimes. Rather than fostering more empowerment-based management, this approach created a system that was often inflexible and stifled innovation, despite many attempts to address its rigidity.
Karl Salgo has written extensively on this disconnect between accountability measures and actual results. In 2016, he wrote about the implementation of Federal Accountability Act ten years later. Paradoxically, the Act created even more layers of bureaucracy (if that is imaginable) which led to increased reporting requirements and operational delays. Instead of increasing transparency as intended, in many ways the Act has made government less efficient and responsive.
Building on this analysis, Salgo wrote another insightful article in the Ottawa Citizen last December arguing that more accountability measures do not necessarily equal better outcomes. Importantly, he demonstrated that excessive accountability mechanisms actually cost more to implement and maintain than they save.
This inefficiency of accountability measures is further explored in Donald Savoie's book Speaking Truth to Canadians About Their Public Service. Although Savoie focuses primarily on the broken accountability relationships between Parliament, Deputies and the public service and Ministers (with political staff added to the mix), he also addresses the ineffectiveness of performance measurement tools like program evaluations as a means of reporting meaningful outcomes to Canadians.
While I would never argue against demonstrating accountability for taxpayer dollars — which is indeed paramount — when such demonstration becomes ineffective at actually showing performance and is costly to produce, we need to start questioning its value. The fundamental problem with many of these exercises is that we rarely step back to evaluate what we are doing; instead, we just continue to "feed the beast," a concept Savoie highlights in his book. This term is well-known within the bureaucracy as the perpetual need to pump more information into the system, whether for central agencies, senior executives, or the political echelon, to address the question of the moment.
This constant demand for information without clear purpose was certainly a bone of contention during my time in government. Even with cyclical, annual reporting requirements, it was difficult to develop a predictable routine of what would be required in terms of data and information. In my previous article about priorities, I described how other people's work, often justified in the name of accountability to the public, would frequently derail my own team's mandate and throw us off track from accomplishing our objectives. Whether because of poor judgment in planning tasks and timelines, or because the exercise itself was futile, we seemed to grow accustomed to plowing ahead without ever considering whether we were on the right course. In my later years as an Executive, I occasionally found allies among the small minority questioning the utility of these exercises or calculating the cost-benefit ratio to make a point about their inefficiency.
There is no doubt that the way government measures performance — both of its people and its operations — needs significant improvement. However, achieving this improvement requires a fundamental culture change.
Compliance-oriented organizations typically develop deeply embedded norms that drive decisions at every level. As Honig observes: "Some people will truly own the rules. They will come to think that complying with the rules is the same as doing their best possible work and serving their organization's mission." When rule-following becomes the primary goal, the actual mission and service to citizens can become secondary considerations.
This phenomenon isn't unique to government. Consider this everyday example: You notice a fraudulent charge on your bank statement and call your bank for assistance. The representative rigidly follows a script, asking unnecessary security questions even after verifying your identity. Instead of focusing on resolving the issue quickly, they prioritize procedure over efficiency, frustrating you in the process. This illustrates how strict rule-following can impede accomplishing the actual task at hand.
In systems where people are trained primarily to focus on compliance, there is little opportunity to develop and exercise a critical leadership skill: judgment. Yet ironically, in the Government of Canada, public servants are hired and their performance is assessed based on core competencies that include "thinking things through" which explicitly involves using sound judgment.
During my government career, I learned invaluable lessons from both developing my own judgment and observing others exercise theirs. Perhaps more instructively, I learned from situations where judgment was lacking, either my own or that of people I managed.
This raises a crucial question: If we are constantly micro-managing and never giving people the autonomy to demonstrate their judgment, how will we know what they are capable of?
Empowerment isn't about abandoning standards or oversight, it's about shifting from controlling how work gets done to clarifying what needs to be accomplished and why it matters. The leaders I most admired in government were those who clearly communicated expectations, provided necessary resources and support, removed obstacles, and then stepped back to let their teams exercise their expertise. These leaders remained available for guidance and feedback, but fundamentally trusted their teams to deliver. Interestingly, these empowering leaders often found their teams exceeded expectations precisely because they felt trusted to bring their full capabilities to the work.
This is where trust becomes essential. In his work with governments, Honig encourages accountability to go beyond the standard accounting practices of metrics and targets to incorporate a broader process of employees "giving account" of their work and its impact. Importantly, Honig isn't suggesting eliminating targets or metrics entirely, these would continue to play an important role in performance measurement where appropriate. Instead, he introduces trust as the critical element that has long been missing from the accountability equation.
There is abundant evidence that trust in public service has eroded, not just in Canada but globally. The United States represents perhaps the most extreme case of what happens when politicians lose faith in government institutions (and display complete disregard for public servants). The stories of dedicated civil servants facing unprecedented challenges are heartbreaking. Yet I've been amazed (though not surprised) to see public servants maintain an unwavering commitment to their work despite the treatment they've faced from their government.
I could elaborate at length about the extraordinary people who choose careers in public service. During my 16-year career, I met hundreds of exceptional public servants whose sole desire was to serve Canadians. These individuals cannot defend themselves against public criticisms because of the oath they take as public servants. They deserve a system that trusts their judgment and allows them to be truly accountable for outcomes rather than merely compliant with processes.
The lesson I'm trying to teach my children about accountability, that it involves taking responsibility for both actions and outcomes, is precisely what our government systems should embody. True accountability isn't about creating more reports, checkboxes, or compliance measures; it's about fostering environments where people can exercise good judgment, make meaningful decisions, and take genuine ownership of results.
When we replace trust with excessive compliance requirements, we not only increase costs and reduce efficiency but also undermine the very accountability we seek to enhance. Public servants join government to make a difference. By trusting their judgment and focusing accountability on outcomes rather than processes, we can create a government that serves citizens better while respecting the professionals who deliver those services.
The path forward requires balancing oversight with empowerment. Managing for empowerment means creating systems where public servants can clearly see how their work contributes to meaningful outcomes for citizens, have appropriate autonomy to apply their expertise, receive feedback focused on impact rather than process adherence, and are recognized for innovation and problem-solving rather than merely following rules. It means trusting professionals to use their judgment while holding them accountable for results that matter to Canadians.
