One of the most common complaints I hear from folks when I work with a client company for the first time: I wish there was more accountability. There’s no accountability here. Where’s the accountability?
A quick sidebar for the company leadership: note that these words typically come from your individual contributors. Make of that what you will.
Hearing this so often led me to ask myself, “What do people mean by ‘accountability’?” We’re all quick to use the phrase hold someone accountable, but what does that look like in practice? Here’s what I learned. Most of the time what we really mean is – when something goes wrong or a mistake is made – we want to see someone punished. That’s what being held accountable looks like to us. At the very least, give me someone to blame. But preferably, I want to know someone is getting punished.
That’s not particularly helpful in the wake of a mishap. A server went down, someone used too many zeroes in the marketing spend, whatever – what does punishing them do to solve the problem? Well, not nothing. It satiates our craving for fairness. But that doesn’t fix the server.
A CEO once told me being held accountable means when you spill the milk, you clean it up. Biff was accountable for the server having zero downtime. It crashed. Now he’s on the hook for getting it back up. Biff makes sure that happens, even if he personally doesn’t have access to it or have the technical knowledge to fix anything. Biff sees to it that the server gets back up.
Will we hold Biff accountable? Yes. We know he’s the one who’s got to own this so we will be watching very closely. We won’t throw our hands in the air and lament the downtime, wishing someone would do something.
I think that’s a great first step, but there needs to be more to it. Mistakes can happen. One in a million, perfect storm-style scenarios can occur. But what if it happens more than once? What if Biff is accountable and this isn’t the first time he’s spilled the milk? Or if his response time in cleaning it up isn’t fast enough? This is another element of accountability, and it’s one that the rest of the team is complaining about when they say “I wish people were held accountable.” Does Biff clean up the milk well enough, fast enough, and only ever spill the milk once? If your team doesn’t feel they can answer yes to all of those questions, that’s when they complain.
Herein lies the difficulty. Calling Biff out for repeat failures requires conflict, and most of us are bad at that. Four times out of five, Biff’s manager has had no training to address this sort of thing. Maybe that manager is skilled at difficult conversations and won’t hesitate to be straight with Biff. But the odds are against that happening.
And what do you even say as Biff’s manager? “Biff, this has happened more than once. Make sure it doesn’t happen again, or else.”
Or else what?
What’s an organization prepared to do with repeate negligence, or deficient skills, or straight up incompetence? When was the last time your company promoted someone into a role, realized it was a mistake, and then demoted that person? I worked for 11 years as a developer on big budget video game projects and only saw anything like that happen once. And that wasn’t even demoting someone for incompetence, it was scapegoating someone for bad decisions made above their pay grade. The gymnastics my employer went through to never demote someone…man. Olympic gold medal, for sure.
Why? Why is it so hard to do? We don’t want them to feel bad? Don’t want to hurt their feelings?
Like, I get it. Intrinsically and as a business model, I’m driven by empathy for workers. But the first priority of a healthy company is the business needs. Second is the needs of the people. If the company doesn’t last, you have no people to take care of. And serial incompetence is definitely a threat to any company.
If I’m Biff’s manager I’ve got to move him to another role. Likely, that’s going to look like a demotion. That’s a failure, but it’s on me. I promoted him into a position he wasn’t ready for. Maybe I should get demoted too, but the point is it’s not all on Biff. There are probably systemic failures here. Do we promote people because we have a gaping hole in the org and have to fill it with the best person within arm’s reach? Do we promote people based on tenure rather than assessing how much value they add? Do we do a crummy job of training managers to evaluate competence?
These are questions to ask the next time you hear anyone complain about accountability.
image courtesy of Leonard Cotte via unsplash