How can we hold individuals accountable in a constructive way that leads to increased performance and stronger relationships?
Striving for cultural accountability through creating a sense of ownership does not absolve us from holding individuals accountable. We need to learn to have difficult conversations and to address mismatched expectations. This is another topic that is close to my heart for many reasons, and not just because I have honed this skill over the years as a manager. In fact, difficult conversations in general are something that I entirely avoided for far too long in my youth, and that few people are naturally good at. It wasn’t until the stakes were higher in my personal relationships and particularly in higher level leadership roles that I was forced to face my lack of abilities, educate myself, and practice.
Taking a class on Mediation and talking about varying styles of conflict, I realized how being Italian is seen by many as being able to directly engage in conflict, to argue, often loudly and passionately. While growing up my broader family and I engaged in loud, passionate discussions, they were rarely vulnerable and in hindsight I would not consider those to be difficult conversations. In fact, growing up in the midst of chaotic emotional volatility, vulnerability was nonexistent and led to me avoiding true, difficult conversations until much later in life. And unfortunately, loud, emotional, even aggressive talking is equated with holding people accountable, so that people either double down on that style and only learn to hold others accountable through aggressive emotional outbursts, or become entirely avoidant, afraid of confrontation, and never learn to hold others accountable.
Everyone has their reasons for avoiding difficult conversations. I believe that even the most hardened, tough executives avoid them. There is a misconception that exploding, yelling, and eventually firing an employee for lack of performance is a form of being tough, of holding someone accountable. In fact I believe that this couldn’t be further from the truth and is a highly abusive way to try and achieve an outcome. It is not difficult to explode and abuse, and prevents both sides from actually becoming vulnerable, connecting, understanding, and seeking a positive outcome. Tough managers are often the opposite of tough – unclear about their goals, unskilled in conveying expectations and disappointment, and therefore insecure and unable to control their tempers. I ultimately believe that what makes a tough manager is the ability to be vulnerable – to make controversial statements, to expose their ignorance, to ask for help, to share their beliefs and be willing to debate instead of impose, and yes, to have to tell someone that they are no longer able to be part of the team after repeated infractions of expectations.
This topic is close to my heart as I care to help create environments in which we strive for excellence, but avoid abuse, and deepen our relationships. By learning about and practicing these skills, we not only become better managers capable of improving our team’s outcomes and performance. We also become better employees, aware of what is a fair way to hold one accountable, and what is abuse, helping to chip away at dysfunctional power dynamics that often exist in organizations.
It all starts with trust. The foundation for having difficult conversations and holding employees (or peers, or managers) accountable is psychological safety. The ability to exchange ideas with each other and not feel personally attacked, our identity questioned, our very human self-worth put on the line.
This means we can’t jump straight into holding individuals accountable if we haven’t already invested heavily in building trust both on a 1:1 level and as a team, as a social system. We also can’t jump straight into a difficult conversation without an initial period of get-to-know each other. How exactly we build trust and psychological safety is a lengthy topic for another essay.
Despite the focus on safety, the fear of potentially hurting someone’s feelings or making them question their identity should NOT be a reason to avoid the confrontation. It is our responsibility to help create the safe space, to avoid personal attacks, and to seek to understand. And, we cannot take responsibility for the other person’s reaction and feelings. In fact, it is often the case after several difficult accountability discussions and lack of performance that a role and identity conversation becomes critical. This will trigger incredibly difficult emotions in an individual, and the best we can do for the organization and for the individual is to help coach them through those and face feelings head on. What is never ok is to be unkind and to get them to question their intrinsic self worth as a human being.
Another foundational element for having difficult accountability conversations is to have clear behavioral expectations. As Patrick Lencioni eloquently and repeatedly warns against, if you’re holding individuals accountable for missed dates and subpar outcomes, you waited until the train derailed and it’s far too late. A healthy culture of excellence and high performance stems from continuous accountability to specific behaviors which we believe lead to the desired outcomes.
In our world of knowledge work, I believe that those behaviors and expectations have to be collaboratively defined with the team. We hire smart, experienced individuals and want to give them free reign to bring their best self to work. No two individuals and no two teams are ever the same, and the process of defining Working Agreements helps the team refine their own understanding of how they accomplish their best work, together. As managers, principal/staff+ engineers, and leaders, our role is to gently nudge through sharing our experience, instilling our values, and defining any hard constraints that reflect business needs or policies. The buy-in and clarity created from this exercise is powerful and a huge step towards the team learning to self-organize.
Lastly, they create a powerful tool for team members to bond over a shared but unique-to-the-team way of working together, and a fun game to strive for high performance. It opens room for a manager or a peer to praise particularly powerful expression of the Working Agreements, and to hold each other accountable as a team in real-time when we miss (and to learn from the miss!). Most importantly, these behavioral expectations make it easier for everyone to initiate and structure a potentially difficult accountability conversation.
When an expectation has been broken, the most important and first step of an accountability conversation is to figure out what you actually have to talk about – what is the problem you’re addressing? You have to take the time to unbundle the problem. In complex, high stakes environments we often rush straight into an accusation, and don’t recognize how the issue is a messy mix of practical, emotional, and relational issues. The are many layers to any human interaction and particular one that has created conflict (and the need for an accountability conversation). It will be much easier and much more effective to learn to separate those layers and the various issues within each layer, and to be mindful and strategic in choosing which to address. It is equally critical to not avoid the conversation, letting silence slowly fester into abuse.
The next biggest challenge to having accountability conversations is lacking the right mental models, the understanding of the structure, and the language. Remembering back to my early difficult conversations as a manager, I felt the greatest uncertainty not from the confrontation itself, but from the lack of knowledge of any structure, the ambiguity of where a conversation might go, the fear of being wrong about important facts. It was easy to visualize how the conversation might derail, and I lacked any skill and language to help keep it on track and focused on what matters. Since then, the mental models gained through many books and coaching, and the skills gained in practice, have helped me become much better at creating structured, focused, and productive difficult conversations.
The structure of conflict and a difficult conversation has been described in various theoretical frameworks and books. Here is a summary of various concepts and terms from broad sources.
Facts, Feeling, Identity
As Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen describe so beautifully in their book Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most, every difficult conversation has three important layers that need to be identified and separated. Failing to separate them will result in frustratingly debating in circles, failing to talk about each will result in dissatisfying outcomes and lack of buy-in.
Facts are about specifically what happened, the events, the practical reality. It’s important to remember that facts are always observed and filtered through our own lens, and if we want to be effective and intellectually honest, we need to remain curious, listen to understand, and untangle the various stories, clearly separating facts from interpretations.
Feelings are the most ignored part of a difficult conversation in a professional setting, and why we often leave dissatisfied. Facts might be wrong and misinterpreted, but feelings should be acknowledged regardless of what we believe caused them. I find that, as a manager and the power dynamic on my side, being the first to open up about feelings sets a powerful precedent of safety and trust, creating space for employees to do so as well.
Identity is the most complex of the three layers and primarily an internal conversation. My identity drives how I might feel about this very confrontation, drives what I might have done and how I will respond. If the identity conversation is addressed head on, it can be the most powerful tool for accountability and growth when there is a significant mismatch in expectations and outcomes.
Content, Pattern, Relationship
Another mental model is the Content, Pattern, and Relationship (CPR) phases of accountability conversations defined in the book Crucial Accountability – Tools for Resolving Violated Expectations, Broken Commitments, and Bad Behavior.
I love this framework because it creates language and tools for constructive escalation. The risk of approaching accountability with kindness and a seek first to understand mindset is that your goodwill can be taken advantage of, performance slides one event after another, and you feel like you’re being walked over. The CPR framework has helped me find the language to steadily escalate an accountability conversation and reach a conclusion more quickly when the person fails to live up to the request.
The first phase is about the content of the issue, where you discover what happened and help reset expectations. The following conversation becomes about the pattern of behavior, and the stakes are much higher because a pattern, if unaddressed, will eventually affect the relationship. This is the last phase of an accountability conversation, and one we often ignore to voice, requiring more vulnerability and willingness to get into feelings and identity.
Intent, Impact, Blame
The last critical mental model is to distinguish intent from impact and never assign blame. Accountability discussions at work are often needed in the aftermath of a missed commitment or a subpar behavior, actions and omissions that usually lead to negative impacts to the business, customers, or other stakeholders. Despite that, looking for and assigning blame does nothing but tear at the foundation of trust you established earlier, and going into a conversation assuming intent is not effective. In fact, intent and blame will shift us into a more aggressive frame of mind, only leading to further emotionally escalate a potentially charged conversation. Reshaping your own story around intent is a valuable tool to learn to manage that disappointment or anger caused by negative impact, helping you stay centered and objective in those difficult conversations.
There are many other factors to consider and other models and tactical tools available to help create the most impactful accountability conversations. Here are a few more concepts that have helped me over the years.
- Motivation vs. Ability vs. Incentives: when discussing expectations and accountability with individuals, it’s important to understand their motivation and capabilities. Do they want the job? Can they do the job? Most importantly underlying that is the question of what systemic/structural incentives might affect this person’s motivation to enact this behavior?
- Make it motivating. When describing a missed expectation and a desired behavior, focus on consequences to the business, team, stakeholders. Why is this behavior important to you and to the business, what specifically is it going to help achieve?
- Nonviolent Communication. A fantastic book and framework for thinking about how the words you choose impact others, and for finding the language the is most likely to create connection, common ground, and lead to effective collaboration.
In a culture of ownership and high performance, with mature teams that are striving toward self-organization, it will be more rare to have these kinds of accountability conversations, and the foundation of trust will have helped make them smoother and constructive. However, the path to that culture will lead you through having lots of difficult conversations and building these skills is deeply important both in a professional setting and in so many daily life situations. Go practice!
The Roaming CTO 
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