Work Blog: The Basics of Accountability, Part 1: Who
My employer rolled out a program a few years ago called Mentoring Circles where they identified someone who was known to be good at a specific skill. This person would be the mentor for a circle of 5-8 people who applied to be in the program. For 2021, I was the mentor for "Ensures Accountability." I really enjoyed the process and actually am doing so again in 2022. Since I recognized that many people probably won't be able to join the mentoring circle, I boiled it down to four blog posts. This is the first of them, and it went up on March 10, 2022.
I was told I needed a process graphic so I used a built-in Powerpoint arrow to outline the four parts. I've removed that here. I also took out some links to HR resources and removed a coda where I urged people to apply for the next iteration of Mentoring Circles. I also removed the name of my company for several places.
It was my good fortune to be a mentor for the Ensures Accountability Mentoring Circle in 2021. Over the course of the program I worked with five individuals to help them get better at this important competency. As defined by HR, someone who is good at Ensures Accountability will Follow through on commitments and make sure others do the same. In addition, they will:
- Act with a clear sense of ownership
- Take personal responsibility for decisions, actions, and failures
- Establish clear responsibilities and processes for monitoring work and measuring results
- Design feedback loops into work
These are useful skills for anyone in any role. Unfortunately, we can't conduct a mentoring circle for all of the people who work here, but I can boil it down to some blog posts! In this series, I will walk through the four Basics of Accountability for everyone.
Let's start at the beginning with:
Who is Responsible?
How many of you have been yelled at for failing to do something that you didn't know was your responsibility? It's no fun, and more importantly, it's not fair. Before you can be held accountable for doing something, you have to know that you are the person who is supposed to do it. Sometimes, establishing ownership is very easy. If your name was assigned to a Jira issue (or its equivalent in whatever system you're using), you know you have to do something. Other times, it's not so clear. How many of you have experienced the following situations?
1. You are in a recurring meeting. A new action item is brought up and the group agrees that it should be done, but nobody specifies who is going to do it. At the next meeting, it becomes clear that nobody actually picked it up and ran with it.
2. You are on a group email chain. Someone responds and says "Can you do ?" It's not specifically assigned to anyone, and nothing happens until somebody else responds to the chain three weeks later asking how it went.
3. You are in your team standup. Your manager says "this issue is urgent, somebody needs to do it today." Nobody's name gets tied to it, and everybody assumes somebody else will do it.
You are not going to be able to effectively hold someone accountable if nobody knows Who is responsible? If you're a manager, you already know that this is an important part of your job, but you do not need to be a manager to resolve these uncertainties. Everyone in any role should feel empowered to have a bias toward action to make sure everyone knows who owns what.
1. If you're in that meeting when they throw around action items without specifying who is doing it, ask who is going to do it!
2. When that group email comes through with new action items for the group, respond and seek clarity on ownership. This might mean claiming ownership yourself, or it might mean suggesting the right person to do it. It might even mean calling a meeting to sort it out.
3. If you're in a standup and an item is called out as urgent, say something to make sure it gets someone specifically assigned to do it.
All too often I've seen people who are confused by what has been asked of them, but who are unwilling to seek clarity. Inevitably, that work falls through the cracks until somebody follows up on it. In some cases the situation keeps getting worse until it becomes an actual crisis that derails everything else. Everyone should have a bias toward action and act to remove this kind of confusion whenever they see it. In these situations, creating clarity on who is going to do something is always better than doing nothing. And of course, once you know who is going to do something, make sure it is recorded in the appropriate system!
Example: Demonstrating a Bias Toward Action
If you have a bias toward action, you will Act with a clear sense of ownership to resolve issues that you are made aware of. Let's discuss a recent example.
I was reading a report last year and noted an item where somebody said "I've raised this concern and none of the people who should be taking care of it are doing anything." I reached out to that person to learn more, and he forwarded me a long email chain between several peers discussing an upcoming technical change in a third party library that was going to cause us some pain. That email chain continued on for more than six months and suggested several different possible courses of action, but it never explicitly said who should make a decision or take the next steps. In the process, this delay and indecision ate up most of the time before the technical deadline, which in turn reduced our opportunity to handle the problem before it became a major pain point. I offered to help him work through the issue, and the person who'd submitted the report said I was welcome to take a shot at it.
First, I scheduled a meeting with several of the people from the email chain to find out what options we had to choose from and to determine Who is Responsible for choosing the option we'd execute. I then scheduled another meeting with the same group plus the person Who is Responsible in their eyes. That person agreed they were responsible, the decision was made and we started moving forward on it. That was a total elapsed time of 120 minutes of meetings, which isn't a trivial investment but sure beats more than six months of emails going back and forth with nothing happening. Oh yes, and the option that was chosen had been proposed in one of the very first emails in the chain, so it wasn't something new to the group. We could have had an additional six months of lead time to correct the problem if somebody on the thread had taken action to clarify Who is Responsible.
Did I have special knowledge of the situation that let me make the needed decisions? No. Everybody on that email chain and in those meetings knew more about the problem than I did. Did I have some special title that let me do this? No. I wasn't the manager of any of them. Heck, none of these people even reported to the same VP as me. All I had was a bias toward action that made me say "Let's get everyone together to sort this out." Any one of the people on that email chain could have done the same thing. And so can you!
Next Up
Now that we understand the importance of knowing Who is responsible? as well as having a bias toward action, next time we will discuss the somewhat more vexing question of What are they responsible for? To be clear, *I* am responsible for writing it, and *you* are responsible for reading it!
I was told I needed a process graphic so I used a built-in Powerpoint arrow to outline the four parts. I've removed that here. I also took out some links to HR resources and removed a coda where I urged people to apply for the next iteration of Mentoring Circles. I also removed the name of my company for several places.
It was my good fortune to be a mentor for the Ensures Accountability Mentoring Circle in 2021. Over the course of the program I worked with five individuals to help them get better at this important competency. As defined by HR, someone who is good at Ensures Accountability will Follow through on commitments and make sure others do the same. In addition, they will:
- Act with a clear sense of ownership
- Take personal responsibility for decisions, actions, and failures
- Establish clear responsibilities and processes for monitoring work and measuring results
- Design feedback loops into work
These are useful skills for anyone in any role. Unfortunately, we can't conduct a mentoring circle for all of the people who work here, but I can boil it down to some blog posts! In this series, I will walk through the four Basics of Accountability for everyone.
Let's start at the beginning with:
Who is Responsible?
How many of you have been yelled at for failing to do something that you didn't know was your responsibility? It's no fun, and more importantly, it's not fair. Before you can be held accountable for doing something, you have to know that you are the person who is supposed to do it. Sometimes, establishing ownership is very easy. If your name was assigned to a Jira issue (or its equivalent in whatever system you're using), you know you have to do something. Other times, it's not so clear. How many of you have experienced the following situations?
1. You are in a recurring meeting. A new action item is brought up and the group agrees that it should be done, but nobody specifies who is going to do it. At the next meeting, it becomes clear that nobody actually picked it up and ran with it.
2. You are on a group email chain. Someone responds and says "Can you do ?" It's not specifically assigned to anyone, and nothing happens until somebody else responds to the chain three weeks later asking how it went.
3. You are in your team standup. Your manager says "this issue is urgent, somebody needs to do it today." Nobody's name gets tied to it, and everybody assumes somebody else will do it.
You are not going to be able to effectively hold someone accountable if nobody knows Who is responsible? If you're a manager, you already know that this is an important part of your job, but you do not need to be a manager to resolve these uncertainties. Everyone in any role should feel empowered to have a bias toward action to make sure everyone knows who owns what.
1. If you're in that meeting when they throw around action items without specifying who is doing it, ask who is going to do it!
2. When that group email comes through with new action items for the group, respond and seek clarity on ownership. This might mean claiming ownership yourself, or it might mean suggesting the right person to do it. It might even mean calling a meeting to sort it out.
3. If you're in a standup and an item is called out as urgent, say something to make sure it gets someone specifically assigned to do it.
All too often I've seen people who are confused by what has been asked of them, but who are unwilling to seek clarity. Inevitably, that work falls through the cracks until somebody follows up on it. In some cases the situation keeps getting worse until it becomes an actual crisis that derails everything else. Everyone should have a bias toward action and act to remove this kind of confusion whenever they see it. In these situations, creating clarity on who is going to do something is always better than doing nothing. And of course, once you know who is going to do something, make sure it is recorded in the appropriate system!
Example: Demonstrating a Bias Toward Action
If you have a bias toward action, you will Act with a clear sense of ownership to resolve issues that you are made aware of. Let's discuss a recent example.
I was reading a report last year and noted an item where somebody said "I've raised this concern and none of the people who should be taking care of it are doing anything." I reached out to that person to learn more, and he forwarded me a long email chain between several peers discussing an upcoming technical change in a third party library that was going to cause us some pain. That email chain continued on for more than six months and suggested several different possible courses of action, but it never explicitly said who should make a decision or take the next steps. In the process, this delay and indecision ate up most of the time before the technical deadline, which in turn reduced our opportunity to handle the problem before it became a major pain point. I offered to help him work through the issue, and the person who'd submitted the report said I was welcome to take a shot at it.
First, I scheduled a meeting with several of the people from the email chain to find out what options we had to choose from and to determine Who is Responsible for choosing the option we'd execute. I then scheduled another meeting with the same group plus the person Who is Responsible in their eyes. That person agreed they were responsible, the decision was made and we started moving forward on it. That was a total elapsed time of 120 minutes of meetings, which isn't a trivial investment but sure beats more than six months of emails going back and forth with nothing happening. Oh yes, and the option that was chosen had been proposed in one of the very first emails in the chain, so it wasn't something new to the group. We could have had an additional six months of lead time to correct the problem if somebody on the thread had taken action to clarify Who is Responsible.
Did I have special knowledge of the situation that let me make the needed decisions? No. Everybody on that email chain and in those meetings knew more about the problem than I did. Did I have some special title that let me do this? No. I wasn't the manager of any of them. Heck, none of these people even reported to the same VP as me. All I had was a bias toward action that made me say "Let's get everyone together to sort this out." Any one of the people on that email chain could have done the same thing. And so can you!
Next Up
Now that we understand the importance of knowing Who is responsible? as well as having a bias toward action, next time we will discuss the somewhat more vexing question of What are they responsible for? To be clear, *I* am responsible for writing it, and *you* are responsible for reading it!