One of the saddest images I recall ever seeing in a business context happened in a retail store. The owner of the business was berating his sales personnel because traffic was pretty low at the store. So the sales clerks were hanging their heads in shame as they were being castigated thusly.

Now that would probably have okay if the sales personnel were responsible for going outside and ushering people to come into the store. But these were in-store clerks. In other words, their primary duty was simply to assist people who were already inside the store. Pulling people inside was not even in their job descriptions.

This is a simple example of the challenge involved in identifying accountability. Formal organizations are like efficiently-designed clocks, where everyone plays a role and all the parts fit together. The manager is the conductor, overseeing how each role gets acted out and making sure that the lines of responsibility are clear.

Sometimes, however, the entire concept of professional bureaucracy isn’t too clear to a business owner. And then we end up with a situation like the one above, in which people get blamed for things that they didn’t even know they were supposed to be doing in the first place.

So in the above example, who should be blamed for the lack of traffic? Well, it should be whoever it is who’s responsible for attracting traffic in the first place. If the owner hired someone to set up the window frontage, then perhaps this person’s a likely candidate. And if the owner had hired someone to do promotions for the shop, then maybe this person would be it.

Of course, if the owner has not hired anybody to do any of these, then perhaps it is the owner who is at fault.

But then many business owners have trouble blaming themselves for anything and find it easier to blame others — which is an unhealthy attitude because they end up not addressing the root cause of the problems.

Professionally-run firms are characterized by clear job descriptions that make it easy for the people to understand exactly what they should be doing and how they will be evaluated. It’s fair for the employees, and it makes it easier for the manager to pinpoint who is responsible for what.