The Roaming CTO

On Accountability.

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by

bernardofanti
in

How accountability is misused at work and how to change that

Spend long enough on a team in your job and especially in a tech startup that needs to move fast and ship a lot of features, and you will have heard one of the following:

  • “Why can’t this team / this department be accountable?”
  • “We need more accountability in our company!”
  • “Let’s build this feature and let’s show some accountability team!!!”
  • “We need to hold this person/team accountable!”

While these statements can occasionally inspire greater performance, broad proclamations like that have often instilled fear in me as an employee at any level, and I have interpreted them as lacking trust in my ability to perform my work well. I am drawn to discuss this topic of accountability because of how it shapes and is shaped by the power dynamics that exist in teams and organizations, and the resulting fear and damage to psychological safety that abusing it can create. I strive to better understand the concept of accountability and related power dynamics, and to help articulate clear ideas and powerful practices, for two main reasons. First, because accountability is important and I want to help give leaders and teams tools to continuously improve their performance and business impact. Second, to help break dysfunctional or potentially manipulative power dynamics and give individuals with less formal power the tools to engage in healthy, informed discussion and stand up for themselves or their teams.

What does it mean to be accountable? Originating in financial activities, the word etymology itself implies a form of measuring, keeping track of, adding up and determining how the inputs relate to the outputs. Extending those concepts to a work environment with people doing work, being accountable for something implies having a definition of the work that needs to be done, committing to the work that needs to be done, and doing and delivering that work. Being accountable for something means honoring those commitments, holding someone accountable means measuring their performance, or worth, based on what they’re supposed to do and how well they are doing it. Unfortunately for the creative knowledge work environment, the term is also often equated with concepts of answerability, culpability, liability. Those terms give it a negative connotation when an unsophisticated manager attempts to increase performance by improving accountability – i.e., finding who is culpable for low performance.

I believe that people mean well and that most of the time, we lack the appropriate communication skills to convey what we really want. I interpret those statements almost as tantrums, as attempts to articulate several different thoughts, feelings, emotions and trying to use language that we haven’t really thought through to achieve a goal we aren’t articulating well. It doesn’t mean there is not a valid, underlying problem that needs to be surfaced and addressed. And that’s our goal – to help guide the problem solving and heal the organization – to understand the underlying problems and address those very directly. While those sentiments are expressed as frustrations often without nuance, they do contain core truth that point to a lack of individual, team, or managerial performance or even a deeper cultural dysfunction.

When I hear those statements, this is often what I rephrase it into in my head depending on context:

  • We’re losing. We’re not doing well. We need to perform better!
  • We aren’t moving fast enough, I don’t know what to do or what to say to make you move faster!!!!
  • You said you would deliver feature X by Y but we’re LATE, why!!!
  • I have this feeling that people are just checking in and out, working for a paycheck, and they just don’t care!
  • I want to motivate my employees with a powerful speech that gets them fired up toward this new project we need to deliver to grow revenue.
  • I just committed to X to achieve a business outcome, I needed to make a fast decision, and now I have to find a way to get it all done quickly!
  • These people or this individual aren’t performing, it’s clear to me and to others, I don’t know how to articulate why though, it’s just a feeling, so I’m going to use say they’re not being accountable
  • The system keeps going down, nobody cares, it takes ages to bring it back up, where’s the accountability!

Unfortunately for those well meaning leaders in positions of power, this use of accountability often results in fear and erosion of trust. And that’s not because employees are not accountable (on average) or don’t want to work in a culture of high performance! I believe the broad, generalized use of “we need accountability” is problematic because of several reasons:

  • Most importantly, because generic statements like that meant to inspire greater performance don’t work and lead to disengagement and ultimately lower performance, certainly in the long term.
  • General statements make everyone feel like they’re not performing and their job is on the cutting block. There is no nuance and people start making up stories.
  • They create an us-vs-them mindset, generally feels directed at front-line workers, individual contributors, and rarely seems to imply managers or executive leaders’ performance is in question.
  • Employees remember plenty of occasions where managers or peers were clearly and visibly not performing and not held accountable to that lack of performance, instilling a sense of cynicism.
  • Is unfair to employees in the hierarchical power dynamic, implying it’s entirely the ICs responsibility to be accountable to X and ignoring the cultural and systemic issues that lead to a lack of performance (and potentially a lack of accountability as a driver of that).

What should we do instead when delivery and operational performance is low and leaders perceive a lack of accountability as the source of that?

I believe the most valuable thing we can do is to reframe the issue from individual lack of accountability to a systemic, organizational issue focused on ownership. Managers often feel the responsibility and put the pressure on themselves to hold their employees accountable when I firmly believe that, barring critical competency or personality issues, employees want to feel a sense of responsibility and have an inner drive to hold themselves and each other accountable when a sense of ownership over their work exists. Through that lens, instead of telling employees what to do and cracking the whip, managers and leaders should be the gardeners that tend the beds and create the systems to bring out the innate accountability and performance of individuals and teams.

This type of accountability should first and foremost focus on roles and processes, instead of outcomes. Shipping a specific feature on time, or even expecting a specific business impact from a feature, is a downstream effect that we don’t always directly control. We do control the steps in the process, the working agreements, and how we show up day-to-day, and the continuous improvement of that process. Those are the things we should hold ourselves, each other, and our employees accountable to.

What does that specifically look like for managers and individual contributors? Managers need to focus on clarity of goals and roles, and ICs need to focus on candid communication, and sharing the information they have through open feedback loops.

As a manager, get very clear on your organizational and business goals. Organizationally, are you trying to increase overall employee performance? How do you articulate and measure that performance? Ship more volume of features? Have more customer & business impact, defined by some KPI? Ship on time? Be clear on what’s most important (and don’t say “everything”!) and articulate it clearly and repeat it over, and over, and over again.

Equally as important is to understand the business goals – ideally, the entire cascade from vision, mission, purpose down to your 3-year, 1-year, and quarterly goals. Make it a habit to share those in exactly the same words at least in your quarterly All Staffs, ideally weekly in your department meeting. Then get even more specific on a project or feature level, what customer problem are we trying to solve? What are the business constraints that might drive schedule vs. quality tradeoffs? Context is critical here.

Then we focus on clear definition of all the involved roles and working agreements. Most importantly, take a look at roles from the lens of the delivery process and be clear on ownership. For each step (ideation, planning, execution, ops, etc.), is it clear who has decision authority? Use a RACI (Responsible Accountable Consulted Informed) or RAPID (Recommend Agree Perform Input Decide) framework for each initiative to create as much clarity and transparency as possible, without which accountability to roles and processes is impossible.

Lastly, one of my favorite tools as a leader to instill a sense of ownership and accountability are Working Agreements. This often forgotten tool gives the team the opportunity to discuss and decide together how they want to perform and deliver on their work. It should give everyone the opportunity to share how they do their best work and what they expect of others to be successful as a team. Working Agreements can focus on technical aspects of the work (we expect every PR to contain unit tests or if you break the build, fix it before wrapping up for the day) but should also include interpersonal aspects of the work (headphones on means do not disturb or specific agreements on Slack and email usage, how we talk to each other in standups and planning sessions, etc.).

As a IC, first and foremost, do a self check – are you in the right role? Do you enjoy the work? Do you have the skills you need? Do you resonate with the team’s mission and the company’s overall vision and purpose? Those are important factors that will influence the sense of ownership you can have over your work, and will ultimately deeply impact your work performance (not to speak of your daily moods and general life satisfaction!). Ideally, you’re able to have candid, vulnerable conversations with your manager about these topics, but I realize that is not always the case. Life and career coaches, mentors, and friends and family can be great resources to help you talk and think through those complex topics and may lead you to decide your current work environment is not right for you to thrive.

Learn to get clear on what you can own, and what you cannot own. Is your role clear, and do you feel the environment allows you to take ownership of particular systems, products, or projects? Speak up if the environment for ownership is lacking. This is a continuous process that happens at the meta level (organization, team, working agreements) and also specifically for each project or feature you work on. Communicate, communicate, communicate. Managers and executives are not perfect and all-knowing, and if there is a gap of expectations you should strive to speak up and address that. Educate yourself on what you can take ownership over and hold yourself (and let others hold you) accountable to, and what you cannot. In other words, create boundaries.

Lastly, ICs in knowledge work have an incredible , unique perspective over managers that no other industry has to the degree we do. They have deep, expert knowledge of technologies and the systems that comprise the company’s products. It is your responsibility to share that knowledge to help make better decisions!

What makes for accountable teams?

  • First, clarity on what we’re holding an individual or team accountable to, very specifically. That means, clarity of vision, mission, purpose, and specific business objectives, milestones, deliverables.
  • RACI/RAPID with clearly defined roles. Who is accountable to whom, what does each role get to decide vs. delegate. Clear definition of the authority that those roles and relationships imply. Clear definition of the team in terms of resource allocation – who’s part of the team, who’s not.
  • A collaborative discussion of what you’re committing to and at least some ability to co-define scope. Transparency and courageous engagement are critical to surface all the information needed to make healthy commitments.
  • Open channels of communication and feedback loops along the way, because no matter what you commit to, things change once you set sail.
  • Lastly, maturity to have rational, objective, psychologically safe conversations before the commitment and all along the way via those feedback loops.

In the next essay, I will go deeper into additional requirements that will make the process of establishing ownership and accountability much more impactful, likely to succeed, and enjoyable for all!

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