How to Build Teams that Follow-Up and Follow-Through
Accountability is a dirty word because it begins in the wrong place. Leaders wrongly think accountability begins with others.
What do you call someone who bulldozes people into compliance? The nice word is jerk.
The belief that accountability begins with others is heavy-handed. In the end, it deflates rather than energizes.
Like everything else in leadership, accountability begins with you.
Assumption:
Assume people want to succeed. Eject everyone who doesn’t care about doing well. But before you remove someone, you might…
- Redesign their job to suit their strengths.
- Retrain them to meet expectations.
- Reassign them to a job that aligns with their temperament.
Compliance:
When accountability is bulldozing reluctant people into compliance, leaders…
#1. Develop negative attitudes toward people. You can’t bring out the best when you think the worst.
#2. Adopt strategies that manipulate rather than motivate.
Unhealthy competition is an example of destructive manipulation. Teams don’t thrive when they hope the person beside them fails.
When accountability is bulldozing reluctant people into compliance, team members…
#1. Get creative at obfuscation.
#2. Feel disrespected.
Don’t expect performance from people you belittle.
#3. Develop resistance.
Pushed people push back.
7 accountability questions for leaders:
Hold yourself accountable when talented people don’t perform.
- What three things are you doing that hinders team performance?
- List three ways you might demotivate people.
- How clear are expectations? (Ask team members to rate this on a scale of 1:5)
- What are the top three strengths of everyone on your team?
- How were others engaged in setting goals and expectations?
- How were timelines and deadlines established?
- How much of your action plan was a team effort? (1:5)
How many times a day are you asking, “How can I help?”
Progress:
How is progress tracked and measured?
Inconsistent tracking and measurement discourages people who want to succeed.
How might leaders misunderstand accountability?
What comes to mind when accountability begins with leadership, not others?
I think leaders influence and inspire people to take on and own the accountability for the assigned tasks, behaviors, and changes that are required.
Lack of buy-in = I don’t feel accountable.
Thanks Paul. Bringing buy-in to the conversation is important. Accountability apart from buy-in is coercion.
This is an interesting one. Sometimes, success for the individual is at a cost to the team, and not infrequently, team/organisational success is expected to be at the cost of the members/individuals.
The other one is the goals, expectations, timelines and deadlines. Generally, these are set by the client, agreed (without regard to reality/capacity) by the sales/BD staff and passed down to the delivery team unaltered on a tablet of stone…
Thanks Mitch. Your comment serves to emphasize the importance of engaging people in the accountability conversation. If it’s true that my colleague has to fail for me to succeed, we need to stop calling it a team and reject the idea of team work.
Same thing for schedules. Client expectations are the driving factor in a conversation that still needs to happen with the team.
Dan, there are no conversations. When the avalanche has started, the pebbles don’t get to vote.
mitchk999, I’ve been in this place, or at least felt like it, and helped change it by changing the conversation. Unless the leaders’ motivation is something other than profit or VERY short-term, I struggle to imagine how this approach is getting leadership what they want, either. Is the firm making money on these engagements? Are the clients satisfied with the outcomes? Just Wednesday I learned about the Trust-Influence loop https://www.leadingagile.com/podcast/trust-influence-loop-mike-cottmeyer/. Even if they don’t care how they’re treating their teams, they probably do care about satisfied clients who pay their bills and send referrals. That’s where to start the conversation, again, maybe with the executive accountable for service delivery. Their life isn’t a happy one right now either. Maybe you can help them help you, and help the whole firm in the process.
Accountability really can’t be successful if it’s top-down. People can enthusiastically engage and buy-in when the process of establishing accountability is team-centric, positive and transparent. There is nothing more frustrating than being handed something to do without any real conversation or clear understanding. I love Paul B. Thornton’s comment that people need to know tasks, behaviors and changes that are required. They also need to understand the context and why these actions really matter.
Thanks Christi. Your comment brings the idea of psychological safety to mind. If we want accountability on our teams, how are we making it safe for people to bring up and discuss important issues?
Dear Dan,
Owning responsibility with clarity of tasks to handle is part of accountability! Moreover, people need to have a total faith in the leader that they follow and his level of fair treatment while facing any challenges. In a cohesive work environment with empowerment people rise to the occasion and excel more than expected.
It’s the leader and his intervention with practical measures determine the timely desired success.
Without authority, you can’t (justly) be held accountable.
Unless you are a micromanager involved directly in the daily details, you need to make sure that the mandate/accountability is accompanied by the authority to make it so.
A leader’s accountability is for WHO he delegates authority to, and they for the authority that they in turn delegate their authorities to. A leader’s accountability is thus for the strategy, not the tactics (except to ensure that they align).
If you want accountability from your people, give them the authority over their own work/responsibilities. If you don’t trust them (with authority along with the responsibility you assign), they won’t trust you (and be accountable for their own work).
no real authority/mandate
= no real responsibility/accountability.
… at least in the considerable experience of this original gangster.
“Don’t expect performance from people you belittle.” That one has applied to me many, MANY times! Unfortunately, I have been the victim of some rather horrific management abuse and each time, I shut down. It starts with poor work performance and leads all the way up to missing work altogether. Who wants to be mentally abused for 12 hours per day? As a result, I never want any of my subordinates to feel the way that I felt so I try my hardest to make everyone feel completely respected and appreciated. So far, it has proven to be very effective. We have a strong team and I actually enjoy going to work.
Coming into this post, I knew very little on how accountability operates in the professional and business sectors. As someone who entered the workforce relatively recently, understanding accountability, as well as the assumptions and rules of compliance behind it, was uncharted territory for me. As a result, I was completely ignorant of good and bad accountability practices, even if I was the perpetrator or the victim. My inability to distinguish good accountability practices from the bad ones left me flying blind. Consequently, as you discuss in the post here, most likely had a negative impact on team efficiency and general collaborative effort. After coming to understand how easy it is to buy into the belief that accountability starts with those other than you, it is almost comical how often I have either witnessed or experienced compliance bulldozing.
I could never really put an expression to the feeling until I read the post, but the word “bulldozing” fits perfectly. There is always this unspoken and passive tension when this occurs, and I think that tension is a primary driver for the negative outcomes of this practice. The resentment and passive aggression just builds and builds both between peers and leadership, until there is no distinguishable cohesive effort and very limited communication. People just start to look out for themselves and compete and the toxicity just seems to get out of control sometimes. You are absolutely correct here Dan in that both parties lose. I think my favorite part about your advice here on how to address this problem though is the assumptions. Rather delegate tasks in belittling commands, assume your people want to succeed, and discuss/outline the expectations with them heading into a goal or project. Transparency and accountability like this would be amazing, not bulldozing people with belittlement and passive aggression.
The “seven accountability questions for leaders” are a really excellent resource, or they would be for a leader who has a really good sense of their own strengths and weaknesses. I find most people, even those that can give a particularly astute assessment of others are monumentally bad at seeing themselves as others see them or recognize the sabotaging behaviors they inflict on the people around them. So how do we learn to see ourselves the way others see us? If we noticed our bad habits as we practiced them I’m sure we’d take effort to change those habits. The problem is two fold. First, how do we learn to recognize the mistakes we are making? Second, how do we employ new strategies in the moment?
One key to learning our strengths in letting the people hampered by them speak freely. This can be tricky. Subordinates are not likely to want to confront their bosses with their shortcomings. The simplest answer is to allow employees to fill out anonymous assessments of leadership. However, there are problems with this method of assessment. One, they can feel like just one more bit of extraneous paperwork to fill out, depending on how often the company sends out peer or management assessments. There can sometimes be a sense of “assessment fatigue” where employees are asked to rate various aspects of the company so often without ever seeing tangible results that they stop putting effort into the assessment. Additionally, there can be a sense when employees don’t have the opportunity to discuss their perceptions with their peers that they are the only person feeling negatively about the actions of the supervisor.
Either way I think it’s important not to rely on yourself and your own perceptions of what is or is not working with your group. Open up communication and allow your employees to come together with a unified answer to those seven questions.
Leadership is a tricky role to fill. Mainly because each person under your command values different carrots in their own way, and some people only respond to the stick.
Finding what a person values can be easy to discern. Being able to give what motivates these people the most is where things get tricky. Some people want more money, more paid vacation time, promotions and advancement opportunities, or simply something tangible given to them that equals the extra effort they provide. Raises and promotions are not something easily given in a company. Managers may not have that ability or authority. Incentives are more easily obtained from upper management. Safety bonuses, either monthly, quarterly, or yearly, are a common incentive for people to give that much more effort in their work. Cash is the preferred and easiest method for these incentives, but decent merchandise can also be given when the appropriate merchandise for your audience is offered. Merchandise takes more time for a manger to obtain and finding the right merchandise for your audience takes even more time, but people tend to appreciate the gesture more, especially if their grill just broke or you offer the newest line of makeup or hair care products.
When cash or merchandise are offered as incentives, the metrics for measuring the workers performance must be clear, concise, and easily measurable by the workers who are keeping track of their own performance. If they feel they have been cheated or scammed by the metrics in place their morale and performance can plummet lower than if they were never offered an incentive in the first place. Metrics should be easily defined, quantified, and applied fairly to everyone eligible for the incentive. Even a rumor that the system is being cheated or is being applied unfairly can severely damage moral and all workers performance will suffer.
Leadership is an incredibly difficult task. Not only does it carry weight, but it is incredibly fragile. Having worked with a variety of different employers, it is easy to see how much their leadership style has an impact on each employee. The team’s cohesiveness, and work ethic truly starts with the leader. Leaders may misunderstand accountability, because they have been led to believe that it is those peoples beneath them duty, to subscribe and act on their own volition. However, it is important to change this thinking and the way people are brought up to leadership in the working world. The way to do this is by asking questions.
I think the questions you have brought up are incredibly important. It is so important for leaders to think critically, and to truly lead, and that is precisely what these questions make a leader do. When a leader can take these questions into account, the employee will get put first above the job. For some people this may seem backwards but at the end of the day, a company will get much more out of an employee by valuing them, and ensuring they value their position. Once a leader, accepts this role, and has accountability start with them, what begins to happen is a great team, great works, and followers/employees who will cherish their work and tasks as more than just a job.
It seems to me that accountability should begin with myself, and I agree, in that, it’s good to assume that people want to do a good job. Cynics might find that difficult, but I tend to assume good intentions from everyone. It’s also true that accountability shouldn’t start with others regardless of one’s position in leadership. Personal responsibility gets a bad rap even though it’s smart and much more peaceful to look at situations and ourselves to see what we can do to contribute in a positive way.
It’s also brilliant to take time to look at the strengths of your employees and help them do work that aligns with those strengths. I learned a lot about myself and the areas that I enjoy and flourish in when I did a Strengths Finder assessment. My enneagram also helped make sense of things I already knew about my personality, and my communications-heavy job allows me to shine often. I’d have a very different opinion about my job if I had to spend more time looking at spreadsheets or researching quantitative data. I’m not good at that, but there are others in my office who are. They do that work while I spend more time face-to-face with students.
The work environment has a reputation for feeling punitive and authoritarian. I remember many less than pleasant interactions with a few less than stellar bosses who identified work shortcomings and immediately listed off the many repercussions that would ensue if I didn’t make the improvements. Words like “probation”, “action plan”, “freeze on merit-based raises”. In my experience while working in healthcare, I have seen leaders often selected because of their seniority and expertise at healthcare related issues, but are rarely evaluated for their ability to lead. Health institutions often falsely assume that the best clinician is the best leader. All too often the best clinician is simply better at their clinical skills. These people can be type-caste as highly compliant and accurate, as well as dedicated to the mission of the institution. I would describe them as rigid, overconfident, bossy, and more invested in their own advancement.
Some of the best supervisors I’ve encountered have experienced some sort of shortcomings or have experience with failure. They take little to no satisfaction in the “gotcha!” stuff. Some of my most beloved supervisors created an environment of easy applicability and the posture that they are available to serve us, while also maintaining the mission and goals of the institution. In turn, with these relatable supervisors, the rest of the team remained motivated and performed better.
I wholeheartedly agree that accountability should begin with oneself. I have been on the receiving end of “bulldozing” by a supervisor, and I have also “bulldozed” other people in the past. I recognize the detrimental effects of forcing reluctant people into compliance because it often decreases the morale of a team and makes others feel disrespected. Even though bulldozing teammates is often done to increase their productivity or get work done, the negative side effects often outweigh any potential benefits. During a class this semester, I was assigned to a group with four students where we had to do a semester long project. I had two teammates who were unresponsive and would rarely come to meetings or class. In order to get work done, I unfortunately ended up bulldozing them into compliance in order to finish our assignments. However, I now realize this was not the best approach to the problem because it further created discord within our team, since one of the teammates felt belittled and disrespected. In order to better accommodate difficult teammates, I should have reassigned their tasks to fit their personality as well as their strengths. I now see that bulldozing others is very shortsighted and ineffective, even if you have difficult teammates. As leaders, the goal should always be to keep the team united and assume all individuals want to succeed. Because the leader should be the role model for a team, accountability should always begin with him or her.