Since the end of September, I’ve been writing to you about The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team, based on Patrick Lencioni’s book. Today, I’d like to look at the fourth dysfunction: failure to hold each other accountable.
Holding our peers accountable is not easy. Most of us don’t like confrontation and giving negative feedback. In the future, I’ll probably talk about the book Crucial Conversations by Kerry Patterson, which I’ve found a real help in giving feedback. It is far easier to just let things slide. However, we should also be careful of pushing too hard. It is tough to admit failure. Look for subtle signs that the person is admitting accountability. Hold them accountable, but don’t embarrass them.
We can also be reluctant to take accountability. When something needs to be done it is easy to agree that something must be done. If no one steps up to take accountability it is unlikely that anything will get done.
When we look at teams that avoid accountability, there is usually a lack of trust at the heart of the issue. Without trust conflict becomes more threatening and less constructive. Teams that don’t hold each other accountable usually also lack commitment. They don’t do the hard work of making good decisions and then supporting the decisions. I have a friend who would call this “quiet conference rooms and loud hallways syndrome.”
When we trust each other, it is easier to take negative feedback because we know it is coming from a good place and is not a personal attack. A great team that I was a part of had a lot of members with sarcastic senses of humor. You might think this would be trouble, but since they were also self-deprecating it defused a lot of difficult situations. It was easier to admit you let the team down when everyone was laughing with you. It was also easier to take accountability when everyone was quick to do it. Today you admit that you could have done better while tomorrow the person next to you does. The leader plays a very important role here. A leader who takes accountability, and is quick to admit mistakes then commit to fixing them, sets a great example.
Some think of accountability as fixing blame. Yes, technically it is, but it is so much more. Blame is a small part. When I was the CEO of Merit Network, we had ongoing issues with the quality of our services. I instituted what I learned in the Army as “After Action Reviews.” We would sit everyone involved in the conference room and go through every step that led up to the outage, and how we handled it. At first, the engineers sat back fearing blame. Once they understood the purpose was to learn how to be better, they enthusiastically engaged. There was an opportunity to get issues beyond their control in front of the CEO. For each chance to do something better, a person took accountability to make sure we did. Our service levels steadily climbed.
Accountability is a key to success. The better we are at being accountable, the better we will support NYU.