Work Blog: The Basics of Accountability, Part 2: What
Part 2 of this four part series was originally posted on March 17, 2022. I once again removed the graphic showing the four basics of accountability as well as the code urging people to sign up for the Mentoring Circles program that this series came out of. Most of the rest of the post is unchanged. I redacted my team name, removed a reference to our issue tracking system and genericized a reference to our group chats. I also removed a link to that group chat and to some HR content in the first paragraph, but the actual text didn't change in that latter case. In a larger loss, I removed a link to a mentoring post one of my colleagues wrote that was really, really good. If you ever come work for my company let me know, and I'll shoot you a link to it!
HR defines the competency of Ensures Accountability by saying that someone who is good at it 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
In the prior post, I introduced four Basics of Accountability. We then dove into Who Is Responsible? We noted that it is incredibly unfair to be held accountable for something you didn't know that you were supposed to do. We also talked about the importance of having a bias toward action, which is another way of saying that someone should Act with a clear sense of ownership.
Next, we will see that you also can't fairly hold someone accountable if they don't know What Are They Responsible For?
What Are They Responsible For?
There are two basic pieces of information that someone needs to know What Are They Responsible For?
- What needs to be done?
- When does it need to be done by?
What Needs To Be Done?
For more than two decades, I was a volunteer at a college radio station. We had nearly a thousand shelves of CDs back in the day before digitization at scale was feasible. CDs would frequently be misfiled, so we would have regular work assignments to "read shelves" and refile anything that had been accidentally put in the wrong place. Each shelf had a numbered label on it, and we'd assign each person 1 shelf per month. We'd do spot checks to to make sure people were actually doing the work.
One day I was doing a spot check, and I saw that shelf 456 had been reported as done, but it was clearly not alphabetized at all. I reached out to the new staff member who had done it, and he was adamant that he'd done it already. I was equally adamant that he had not, because there were some serious crimes against the alphabet going on in shelf 456. When he and I met, the problem quickly became apparent. He thought that he was supposed to do the shelf UNDER the 456 label, which was actually shelf 457. Shelf 457 was alphabetized perfectly - he'd done the wrong shelf!
From his point of view, he had done the work he had been assigned. There was a mismatch between what he had been told to do and what he thought he should be doing, and that mismatch meant that he had done the wrong work. This is why it is very important to be clear about what exactly What Needs to be Done?
Naturally, there are a lot of different ways to misunderstand the assigned work. For example:
- "I didn't realize this work was supposed to be my top priority."
- "I didn't realize that my work was holding up another person's work."
- "I did it the way we did it on my old team, and I didn't know this new team did it differently."
Some of these are questions of priority, so it's important to make sure the person knows what their top priorities are and which items can wait. Some of these are questions of experience, so when defining what needs to be done, make sure to tailor the level of detail in the request to the person's experience level. In my example, I didn't specify that the assignment was the shelf with the label on it. All of the experienced staff members understood this, so there hadn't been a problem before, but the new person didn't. Given that he did the right work in the wrong place, he probably would have done the right work in the right place if I'd specified what the right place was more clearly. Remember that you need to spend extra effort to make sure new team members understand their assignment, as well as ensuring that seasoned team members understand new assignments that are outside their prior experience. In either case, it may be valuable to:
- Walk through the assignment with the person to make sure they understand it.
- Have them confirm their understanding of the assignment verbally.
- Assign them a mentor to check in on their work as it is under way. If you do this, make sure the mentor understands What Needs to be Done both by the mentee and by themselves as the mentor.
Make sure What Needs to be Done? is written down in whatever issue tracking system you are using. This means you've documented the agreed upon expectations for What Needs to be Done? You should also make sure that the assigned person knows where to go if they have questions. Maybe it's a 1:1, maybe it's a recurring meeting like a standup, maybe it's a group chat, maybe they should reach out to a specific person, but whatever the case is, the person should know where to get help if needed.
The good news is that we don't have to reinvent the wheel every time that we assign work to someone else. We have tools that can assist with defining the expected work, like the Standard Definition of Done (DoD) which must be applied to any change impacting the production release of one of our products. Many of our teams have their own custom DoD which adds team-specific context to the Standard DoD. DoD's aren't just for development work either. MY TEAM NAME HERE has our own DoD to drive our process improvement work.
When Does It Need to be Done By?
Another way to unfairly hold someone accountable is to blame them for not getting something done by a certain time. There are many variations of this problem.
- You never told them about the deadline.
- You gave them a date that turned out to be completely infeasible, and didn't adjust it based on what they reported back.
- You gave them a reasonable date but didn't help them prioritize the action item against all the other things they had to do.
In each of these cases, it is going to be harder to hold someone accountable than if you had set a date to go along with What Needs To Be Done? and then made sure they knew to inform you as soon as they realized they were in danger of missing that date. It's also incumbent on you to follow up appropriately; we'll discuss effective Follow Up in Part 3.
While sometimes there is a clear date that we need something to be done, in other cases that date is a lot less clear. Sometimes we don't have the faintest idea of what effort will be needed. In those latter cases, it is usually very helpful to set a date for the assigned person to circle around and give an update. That update lets you better assign an official date once we have learned more, and more importantly gives the assigned person a milestone to structure their work around.
Next Up
While nobody can be forced to take personal responsibility, by specifying What Needs To Be Done? and What Are They Responsible For? we have given them all the information about what they need to do. This means they have all the information they need to choose to take personal responsibility for their decisions, actions and failures on this specific item. Accountability is a gift - and now they have everything they need to unwrap it!
Now that we've learned about What Are They Responsible For?, you (aka Who is Responsible?) are now responsible for subscribing to this blog (aka What Needs to be Done?) right now (aka, When Does It Need to be Done By?) so that you can read Part 3 of the Basics of Accountability in your inbox when it gets posted!
HR defines the competency of Ensures Accountability by saying that someone who is good at it 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
In the prior post, I introduced four Basics of Accountability. We then dove into Who Is Responsible? We noted that it is incredibly unfair to be held accountable for something you didn't know that you were supposed to do. We also talked about the importance of having a bias toward action, which is another way of saying that someone should Act with a clear sense of ownership.
Next, we will see that you also can't fairly hold someone accountable if they don't know What Are They Responsible For?
What Are They Responsible For?
There are two basic pieces of information that someone needs to know What Are They Responsible For?
- What needs to be done?
- When does it need to be done by?
What Needs To Be Done?
For more than two decades, I was a volunteer at a college radio station. We had nearly a thousand shelves of CDs back in the day before digitization at scale was feasible. CDs would frequently be misfiled, so we would have regular work assignments to "read shelves" and refile anything that had been accidentally put in the wrong place. Each shelf had a numbered label on it, and we'd assign each person 1 shelf per month. We'd do spot checks to to make sure people were actually doing the work.
One day I was doing a spot check, and I saw that shelf 456 had been reported as done, but it was clearly not alphabetized at all. I reached out to the new staff member who had done it, and he was adamant that he'd done it already. I was equally adamant that he had not, because there were some serious crimes against the alphabet going on in shelf 456. When he and I met, the problem quickly became apparent. He thought that he was supposed to do the shelf UNDER the 456 label, which was actually shelf 457. Shelf 457 was alphabetized perfectly - he'd done the wrong shelf!
From his point of view, he had done the work he had been assigned. There was a mismatch between what he had been told to do and what he thought he should be doing, and that mismatch meant that he had done the wrong work. This is why it is very important to be clear about what exactly What Needs to be Done?
Naturally, there are a lot of different ways to misunderstand the assigned work. For example:
- "I didn't realize this work was supposed to be my top priority."
- "I didn't realize that my work was holding up another person's work."
- "I did it the way we did it on my old team, and I didn't know this new team did it differently."
Some of these are questions of priority, so it's important to make sure the person knows what their top priorities are and which items can wait. Some of these are questions of experience, so when defining what needs to be done, make sure to tailor the level of detail in the request to the person's experience level. In my example, I didn't specify that the assignment was the shelf with the label on it. All of the experienced staff members understood this, so there hadn't been a problem before, but the new person didn't. Given that he did the right work in the wrong place, he probably would have done the right work in the right place if I'd specified what the right place was more clearly. Remember that you need to spend extra effort to make sure new team members understand their assignment, as well as ensuring that seasoned team members understand new assignments that are outside their prior experience. In either case, it may be valuable to:
- Walk through the assignment with the person to make sure they understand it.
- Have them confirm their understanding of the assignment verbally.
- Assign them a mentor to check in on their work as it is under way. If you do this, make sure the mentor understands What Needs to be Done both by the mentee and by themselves as the mentor.
Make sure What Needs to be Done? is written down in whatever issue tracking system you are using. This means you've documented the agreed upon expectations for What Needs to be Done? You should also make sure that the assigned person knows where to go if they have questions. Maybe it's a 1:1, maybe it's a recurring meeting like a standup, maybe it's a group chat, maybe they should reach out to a specific person, but whatever the case is, the person should know where to get help if needed.
The good news is that we don't have to reinvent the wheel every time that we assign work to someone else. We have tools that can assist with defining the expected work, like the Standard Definition of Done (DoD) which must be applied to any change impacting the production release of one of our products. Many of our teams have their own custom DoD which adds team-specific context to the Standard DoD. DoD's aren't just for development work either. MY TEAM NAME HERE has our own DoD to drive our process improvement work.
When Does It Need to be Done By?
Another way to unfairly hold someone accountable is to blame them for not getting something done by a certain time. There are many variations of this problem.
- You never told them about the deadline.
- You gave them a date that turned out to be completely infeasible, and didn't adjust it based on what they reported back.
- You gave them a reasonable date but didn't help them prioritize the action item against all the other things they had to do.
In each of these cases, it is going to be harder to hold someone accountable than if you had set a date to go along with What Needs To Be Done? and then made sure they knew to inform you as soon as they realized they were in danger of missing that date. It's also incumbent on you to follow up appropriately; we'll discuss effective Follow Up in Part 3.
While sometimes there is a clear date that we need something to be done, in other cases that date is a lot less clear. Sometimes we don't have the faintest idea of what effort will be needed. In those latter cases, it is usually very helpful to set a date for the assigned person to circle around and give an update. That update lets you better assign an official date once we have learned more, and more importantly gives the assigned person a milestone to structure their work around.
Next Up
While nobody can be forced to take personal responsibility, by specifying What Needs To Be Done? and What Are They Responsible For? we have given them all the information about what they need to do. This means they have all the information they need to choose to take personal responsibility for their decisions, actions and failures on this specific item. Accountability is a gift - and now they have everything they need to unwrap it!
Now that we've learned about What Are They Responsible For?, you (aka Who is Responsible?) are now responsible for subscribing to this blog (aka What Needs to be Done?) right now (aka, When Does It Need to be Done By?) so that you can read Part 3 of the Basics of Accountability in your inbox when it gets posted!