How to Build a Culture of Accountability

If 2020 was the year of a racial reckoning where institutions began to invest time and resources to advance racial equity then 2021 was the year that those same institutions realized that racial equity requires a culture of accountability to succeed.

Creating a culture of accountability takes time. It’s a process of embracing change on an interpersonal and structural level. We support our clients in cultivating relational practices rooted in three forms of self-accountability, mutual accountability, and community accountability.

In June 2021, I wrote about our approach to building accountable work cultures for the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Here’s a brief excerpt from the article:

Last summer, institutions across sectors were called to account for their failure to address systemic racism. Many organizational leaders addressed the backlash by requesting trainings and consultations from professionals like myself in the field of racial equity. Unfortunately, many of these same leaders failed to recognize that hosting a training series on anti-racism or producing a set of public-facing DEI statements and benchmarks were not enough to address the root causes of systemic and structural racism at work in their organization. In the early stages of change, preparing staff members to engage productively in conversations about racism and developing policies and practices that uproot racial inequity is important work. But without a culture of accountability, any effort to prevent racial harm or provide proper redress when it occurs will fall short of accomplishing repairing harm and deepen distrust and disconnection among staff. Read more