How Accountability Works

One of the most common weaknesses I see in managers is an unwillingness to, or a misunderstanding of how to, hold people accountable.

Accountability is very simple to explain, it’s a two-step process:

Gain free commitment from someone to complete some task by some time
If the deadline lapses, ask them why they failed to meet their commitment

That’s it. Ok, happy managing!

Fine. I’ll add a bit more detail.

Free commitment

Staff are often going to be one of, if not the most, valuable (and expensive) parts of a business. Not just in the work they are able to produce, but in the story they tell about the workplace to others.

A business’s ability to hire and retain talent is critical to its growth and success, and so the people working for it are just as important as the people buying from it. That’s why it’s important that all work comes from a free commitment on behalf of the employee to do so - whether or not someone asked or “ordered” them directly. This will be especially important when we come to step 2, because it’s better to hold people accountable to themselves than to you - you’ll see what I mean, shortly.

What can this look like? If you’ve set clear expectations with your team (more on this below) then this can look like sharing a hard problem with your team and expecting someone to offer to take it on. This can look like telling your team “I need xyz done” and expecting someone to step up. This can look like:

“Alex, sorry to derail you today, but I need xyz done today before 5pm, can you do it?”

Notice, even when I’m essentially ordering Alex around, I’ve still asked “can you do it?”. If the answer is “no”, I will ask why, and evaluate the reason - perhaps Alex is not the right choice for an urgent task today; perhaps Alex is being lazy or work-shy. We’ll come to how to deal with this in step 2.

What if someone never steps up? What if someone never offers? Well you need to speak with this person directly and give them that feedback, “you are never the first to put your hand up, I need to see more commitment from you”. If this situation does not improve, then get chatting with HR and head down the path of performance improvement, and terminate without hesitation if they don’t improve. You don’t want this person in your organisation. Simple, right?

As we all know, sometimes you just need someone to do something right now or quickly. You can do this by “spending your boss capital” is how I call it. Every day through all your interactions you are building “boss capital” with your employees based on how you treat them. The more horizontal your relationships are with them, the more you invest in their growth, the more capital you build up. When you need to, you can “spend” this currency, by asking directly - like before:

“Alex, sorry to derail you today, but I need xyz done today before 5pm, can you do it?”

If you have plenty of capital with Alex, and there’s no other reason Alex can’t deliver today, they’ll be happy to do it. If you do this too often without building up your capital first, Alex will come to resent you, and your relationship will sour, and the team will suffer for it. So be sure to invest capital whenever you can, not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because sometimes you’ll need to spend it to avert a crisis, and over-drafting your relationships with your staff is no good for anyone.

Ok, so we’ve gained free commitment. We’ve agreed on a task and a timeline. We’re ready to proceed.

Ideally, the task is delivered correctly and on time. If not, we move on to step 2.

Accountability

There are many ways this step can go but it all begins the same way: simply ask.

“Alex, you told me you’d get this done by 5pm, what’s the hold up?”

Of course, you want to phrase this however is natural in your relationship. Depending on the person this could be “too rough” a way to phrase this question. But regardless of the person it needs to be direct and clear. The key facts we are highlighting are:

You told me you would do x by y time
X has not been done by y time

And the question we ask is simply: why?

You’ll now see why free commitment is so powerful here - let’s imagine the alternative:

I told you to do x by y time
X has not been done by y time

Imagine someone saying this to you. Don’t you kinda want to 🖕 this person? Whereas in the first example, the feeling is more like you’ve let them down - because you have. You promised to do this and it’s not done; they were relying on you and they’ve been disappointed.

Do you remember the power of this with your parents? I’m not mad, I’m disappointed. This is the style of accountability you want - just without the emotional blackmail-y spin your parents probably put on it.

The key is we are holding the person accountable to themselves, not to us¹.

Anyway, now we’ve asked the question, there’s a lot of things that can happen. I’ll cover some of the common ones.

“Sorry, [insert awful emotional thing] happened”

Sadly this is very common. I’ve had “I’m getting divorced”; “my grandfather died”; “my parents are trapped in a hospital in Jakarta and I can’t get in contact with them” - during the Covid-19 pandemic… be prepared for this answer! It will happen more often than you think, which is why you always ask first.

Don’t lead too heavily when you open the conversation and ask the question, specifically because if you get this answer you’ll feel like a complete idiot (ask me how I know).

From here, I think you should be able to navigate this. Awful things happen all the time, and often people don’t know how to raise them or talk about them, and so they just keep trying to complete work in the face of it. Help them with whatever they need, find someone else to do the task, and when it’s appropriate it’s time for feedback:

“I know what happened was awful and can be difficult to talk about, but it’s really important you share something with me - it doesn’t have to be detailed; just enough so I know you need help.”

Something like this. I’m sure you can figure out a kind way to say this.

“Sorry, I tried my best, I just didn’t quite make it”

This is the most common response, in my experience. Most people want to have done the thing they committed to, they just weren’t able to. This could be a skill issue, it could be time management, it could be just about anything. Your job is to keep questioning from here, find the root cause of the issue, give the direct feedback, and set clear expectations for next time.

Let’s say, for example, that it’s a focus or time management issue -

“Sorry, I meant to do it, I was just working on a few other things and I forgot.”

We can poke around a bit here and figure out is it “shiny object” syndrome, is it poor time management, is it lack of prioritisation skills, etc. Then we can make a (mental) plan to help with this in future.

Importantly, right here and now while the issue is hot and fresh, it’s time to give feedback.

“I’m frustrated because I was relying on you to deliver this on time, and now we have knock-on impacts to deal with because it’s delayed xyz other thing.”

Or whatever is appropriate, you get the point. Feedback here is about highlighting the thing they did, telling them exactly how it made you feel, and the objective, negative impact it has had.

This might sound harsh to those of you who are averse to conflict, but with the right staff (the staff you want) this kind of direct feedback builds “boss capital” like nothing else. It’s actually an incredibly powerful team building tool and, I think, the secret recipe to immense personal and professional growth in your staff. You can avoid giving this kind of feedback all you like but your staff will likely never grow and they will continue to disappoint you.

Now we move on to setting clear expectations.

“In future, I need you to let me know when other work is impeding your progress as soon as possible - I will be able to help you prioritise in a way that best suits the team, and I can help push back on extraneous requests if needed. This cannot become a pattern.”

Be clear and direct. Perhaps that’s not exactly how you want to word it, but the idea is here we’re telling them exactly what we would’ve wanted them to do instead, and stating clearly it must happen next time - this is setting expectations. If you do not set expectations, then you can’t expect (hear the word?) your team to step up, and you can’t expect (there it is again!) to hold them accountable to anything².

Now that you’ve set expectations make sure you make a record of this conversation somehow, in case it does become a pattern. You may need the evidence later.

Negative responses

It’s super rare, but you may get a negative response. “You didn’t give me enough time” or “how do you expect me to do all this stuff?” or “whatever, I’ll just get it to you tomorrow, what’s the big deal?”.

Before you proceed here you may want to double check that you:

gained free commitment from this person
set clear expectations of the task and timeframe

You are not perfect - check yourself, first. If you didn’t do either of these, or things weren’t exactly clear on review, it’s very likely this person is right and it’s your fault the work isn’t done the way you wanted and when. But for now, let’s imagine you’ve done your job perfectly and proceed.

Generally speaking, someone who’s going to give you this kind of response is already on your radar. If not, if this is coming out of nowhere, it might be important to take a step back here - there very well could be something personal or emotional going on they’re not willing to raise or aren’t dealing with well. You may not want to push this button. Depending on your relationship, you might variously ask probing questions, take a step back and try again tomorrow, or bring in HR to help you navigate the conversation. You can’t just leave it - that’s the opposite of accountability! - just that now might not be the best time, especially if your relationship with this person is not the strongest yet or you’re not confident in navigating this kind of situation.

Let’s imagine this person is just obnoxious - perhaps they’re consistently under committing or under delivering - I just want to go with the “easy” version of this problem for the sake of word count. In this case, you want to make some kind of official record here. However your company does that, you want to get it in writing somehow, that this person did not deliver as promised. This is not so you can persecute them, this is just so it cannot become a pattern.

If this happens again, with the same person, you now have evidence that delivery is a problem. From here it’s much easier to engage HR and work on a performance plan or head down the path of termination, in more extreme cases. Again, you do not want these people in your company (and neither does anybody else) - and it’s not your job to fix them. So either they shape up, or they ship out.

That’s all there is to it

Easy as that, right! So, in summary:

Gain free commitment from your staff
1. Fire persistent “under committers”
Don’t let them get away with breaking commitments
1. Check yourself first!
2. Ask them why
3. If they have a good reason: give feedback; set clear expectations; write it down
4. If they don’t: give feedback; set clear expectations; write it down

If you still struggle to implement this process, perhaps you are facing a fear of conflict³. This is another problem of its own to solve, but assuming you aren’t afraid to ask someone why they broke a promise, this system should work well for you.

This is actually the basis of coaching people toward their growth goals, too. I will write about this soon. ↩
Failing to set clear expectations is failing, fundamentally, as a manager. A manager who does not set clear expectations is usually doing what I call “guess-and-check management” - they ask for something without setting clear expectations, and then they don’t get what they want, and so they ask for things to be tweaked or repeated, leading their poor staff member into a soul-crushing game of “guess-and-check”. This is the fastest way to kill morale and the surest way to repel anyone competent who understands their worth. ↩
If you are responsible for staff and you are struggling with a fear of conflict you are almost certainly holding your team back. Best get on top of this. ↩