Bernardo Fanti Consulting

Tag: management

  • On Accountability Conversations

    How can we hold individuals accountable in a constructive way that leads to increased performance and stronger relationships?

    Striving for cultural accountability through creating a sense of ownership does not absolve us from holding individuals accountable. We need to learn to have difficult conversations and to address mismatched expectations. This is another topic that is close to my heart for many reasons, and not just because I have honed this skill over the years as a manager. In fact, difficult conversations in general are something that I entirely avoided for far too long in my youth, and that few people are naturally good at. It wasn’t until the stakes were higher in my personal relationships and particularly in higher level leadership roles that I was forced to face my lack of abilities, educate myself, and practice.

    Taking a class on Mediation and talking about varying styles of conflict, I realized how being Italian is seen by many as being able to directly engage in conflict, to argue, often loudly and passionately. While growing up my broader family and I engaged in loud, passionate discussions, they were rarely vulnerable and in hindsight I would not consider those to be difficult conversations. In fact, growing up in the midst of chaotic emotional volatility, vulnerability was nonexistent and led to me avoiding true, difficult conversations until much later in life. And unfortunately, loud, emotional, even aggressive talking is equated with holding people accountable, so that people either double down on that style and only learn to hold others accountable through aggressive emotional outbursts, or become entirely avoidant, afraid of confrontation, and never learn to hold others accountable.

    Everyone has their reasons for avoiding difficult conversations. I believe that even the most hardened, tough executives avoid them. There is a misconception that exploding, yelling, and eventually firing an employee for lack of performance is a form of being tough, of holding someone accountable. In fact I believe that this couldn’t be further from the truth and is a highly abusive way to try and achieve an outcome. It is not difficult to explode and abuse, and prevents both sides from actually becoming vulnerable, connecting, understanding, and seeking a positive outcome. Tough managers are often the opposite of tough – unclear about their goals, unskilled in conveying expectations and disappointment, and therefore insecure and unable to control their tempers. I ultimately believe that what makes a tough manager is the ability to be vulnerable – to make controversial statements, to expose their ignorance, to ask for help, to share their beliefs and be willing to debate instead of impose, and yes, to have to tell someone that they are no longer able to be part of the team after repeated infractions of expectations.

    This topic is close to my heart as I care to help create environments in which we strive for excellence, but avoid abuse, and deepen our relationships. By learning about and practicing these skills, we not only become better managers capable of improving our team’s outcomes and performance. We also become better employees, aware of what is a fair way to hold one accountable, and what is abuse, helping to chip away at dysfunctional power dynamics that often exist in organizations.

    It all starts with trust. The foundation for having difficult conversations and holding employees (or peers, or managers) accountable is psychological safety. The ability to exchange ideas with each other and not feel personally attacked, our identity questioned, our very human self-worth put on the line.

    This means we can’t jump straight into holding individuals accountable if we haven’t already invested heavily in building trust both on a 1:1 level and as a team, as a social system. We also can’t jump straight into a difficult conversation without an initial period of get-to-know each other. How exactly we build trust and psychological safety is a lengthy topic for another essay.

    Despite the focus on safety, the fear of potentially hurting someone’s feelings or making them question their identity should NOT be a reason to avoid the confrontation. It is our responsibility to help create the safe space, to avoid personal attacks, and to seek to understand. And, we cannot take responsibility for the other person’s reaction and feelings. In fact, it is often the case after several difficult accountability discussions and lack of performance that a role and identity conversation becomes critical. This will trigger incredibly difficult emotions in an individual, and the best we can do for the organization and for the individual is to help coach them through those and face feelings head on. What is never ok is to be unkind and to get them to question their intrinsic self worth as a human being.

    Another foundational element for having difficult accountability conversations is to have clear behavioral expectations. As Patrick Lencioni eloquently and repeatedly warns against, if you’re holding individuals accountable for missed dates and subpar outcomes, you waited until the train derailed and it’s far too late. A healthy culture of excellence and high performance stems from continuous accountability to specific behaviors which we believe lead to the desired outcomes.

    In our world of knowledge work, I believe that those behaviors and expectations have to be collaboratively defined with the team. We hire smart, experienced individuals and want to give them free reign to bring their best self to work. No two individuals and no two teams are ever the same, and the process of defining Working Agreements helps the team refine their own understanding of how they accomplish their best work, together. As managers, principal/staff+ engineers, and leaders, our role is to gently nudge through sharing our experience, instilling our values, and defining any hard constraints that reflect business needs or policies. The buy-in and clarity created from this exercise is powerful and a huge step towards the team learning to self-organize.

    Lastly, they create a powerful tool for team members to bond over a shared but unique-to-the-team way of working together, and a fun game to strive for high performance. It opens room for a manager or a peer to praise particularly powerful expression of the Working Agreements, and to hold each other accountable as a team in real-time when we miss (and to learn from the miss!). Most importantly, these behavioral expectations make it easier for everyone to initiate and structure a potentially difficult accountability conversation.

    When an expectation has been broken, the most important and first step of an accountability conversation is to figure out what you actually have to talk about – what is the problem you’re addressing? You have to take the time to unbundle the problem. In complex, high stakes environments we often rush straight into an accusation, and don’t recognize how the issue is a messy mix of practical, emotional, and relational issues. The are many layers to any human interaction and particular one that has created conflict (and the need for an accountability conversation). It will be much easier and much more effective to learn to separate those layers and the various issues within each layer, and to be mindful and strategic in choosing which to address. It is equally critical to not avoid the conversation, letting silence slowly fester into abuse.

    The next biggest challenge to having accountability conversations is lacking the right mental models, the understanding of the structure, and the language. Remembering back to my early difficult conversations as a manager, I felt the greatest uncertainty not from the confrontation itself, but from the lack of knowledge of any structure, the ambiguity of where a conversation might go, the fear of being wrong about important facts. It was easy to visualize how the conversation might derail, and I lacked any skill and language to help keep it on track and focused on what matters. Since then, the mental models gained through many books and coaching, and the skills gained in practice, have helped me become much better at creating structured, focused, and productive difficult conversations.

    The structure of conflict and a difficult conversation has been described in various theoretical frameworks and books. Here is a summary of various concepts and terms from broad sources.

    Facts, Feeling, Identity

    As Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen describe so beautifully in their book Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most, every difficult conversation has three important layers that need to be identified and separated. Failing to separate them will result in frustratingly debating in circles, failing to talk about each will result in dissatisfying outcomes and lack of buy-in.

    Facts are about specifically what happened, the events, the practical reality. It’s important to remember that facts are always observed and filtered through our own lens, and if we want to be effective and intellectually honest, we need to remain curious, listen to understand, and untangle the various stories, clearly separating facts from interpretations.

    Feelings are the most ignored part of a difficult conversation in a professional setting, and why we often leave dissatisfied. Facts might be wrong and misinterpreted, but feelings should be acknowledged regardless of what we believe caused them. I find that, as a manager and the power dynamic on my side, being the first to open up about feelings sets a powerful precedent of safety and trust, creating space for employees to do so as well.

    Identity is the most complex of the three layers and primarily an internal conversation. My identity drives how I might feel about this very confrontation, drives what I might have done and how I will respond. If the identity conversation is addressed head on, it can be the most powerful tool for accountability and growth when there is a significant mismatch in expectations and outcomes.

    Content, Pattern, Relationship

    Another mental model is the Content, Pattern, and Relationship (CPR) phases of accountability conversations defined in the book Crucial Accountability – Tools for Resolving Violated Expectations, Broken Commitments, and Bad Behavior.

    I love this framework because it creates language and tools for constructive escalation. The risk of approaching accountability with kindness and a seek first to understand mindset is that your goodwill can be taken advantage of, performance slides one event after another, and you feel like you’re being walked over. The CPR framework has helped me find the language to steadily escalate an accountability conversation and reach a conclusion more quickly when the person fails to live up to the request.

    The first phase is about the content of the issue, where you discover what happened and help reset expectations. The following conversation becomes about the pattern of behavior, and the stakes are much higher because a pattern, if unaddressed, will eventually affect the relationship. This is the last phase of an accountability conversation, and one we often ignore to voice, requiring more vulnerability and willingness to get into feelings and identity.

    Intent, Impact, Blame

    The last critical mental model is to distinguish intent from impact and never assign blame. Accountability discussions at work are often needed in the aftermath of a missed commitment or a subpar behavior, actions and omissions that usually lead to negative impacts to the business, customers, or other stakeholders. Despite that, looking for and assigning blame does nothing but tear at the foundation of trust you established earlier, and going into a conversation assuming intent is not effective. In fact, intent and blame will shift us into a more aggressive frame of mind, only leading to further emotionally escalate a potentially charged conversation. Reshaping your own story around intent is a valuable tool to learn to manage that disappointment or anger caused by negative impact, helping you stay centered and objective in those difficult conversations.

    There are many other factors to consider and other models and tactical tools available to help create the most impactful accountability conversations. Here are a few more concepts that have helped me over the years.

    • Motivation vs. Ability vs. Incentives: when discussing expectations and accountability with individuals, it’s important to understand their motivation and capabilities. Do they want the job? Can they do the job? Most importantly underlying that is the question of what systemic/structural incentives might affect this person’s motivation to enact this behavior?
    • Make it motivating. When describing a missed expectation and a desired behavior, focus on consequences to the business, team, stakeholders. Why is this behavior important to you and to the business, what specifically is it going to help achieve?
    • Nonviolent Communication. A fantastic book and framework for thinking about how the words you choose impact others, and for finding the language the is most likely to create connection, common ground, and lead to effective collaboration.

    In a culture of ownership and high performance, with mature teams that are striving toward self-organization, it will be more rare to have these kinds of accountability conversations, and the foundation of trust will have helped make them smoother and constructive. However, the path to that culture will lead you through having lots of difficult conversations and building these skills is deeply important both in a professional setting and in so many daily life situations. Go practice!

  • On Accountability.

    How accountability is misused at work and how to change that

    Spend long enough on a team in your job and especially in a tech startup that needs to move fast and ship a lot of features, and you will have heard one of the following:

    • “Why can’t this team / this department be accountable?”
    • “We need more accountability in our company!”
    • “Let’s build this feature and let’s show some accountability team!!!”
    • “We need to hold this person/team accountable!”

    While these statements can occasionally inspire greater performance, broad proclamations like that have often instilled fear in me as an employee at any level, and I have interpreted them as lacking trust in my ability to perform my work well. I am drawn to discuss this topic of accountability because of how it shapes and is shaped by the power dynamics that exist in teams and organizations, and the resulting fear and damage to psychological safety that abusing it can create. I strive to better understand the concept of accountability and related power dynamics, and to help articulate clear ideas and powerful practices, for two main reasons. First, because accountability is important and I want to help give leaders and teams tools to continuously improve their performance and business impact. Second, to help break dysfunctional or potentially manipulative power dynamics and give individuals with less formal power the tools to engage in healthy, informed discussion and stand up for themselves or their teams.

    What does it mean to be accountable? Originating in financial activities, the word etymology itself implies a form of measuring, keeping track of, adding up and determining how the inputs relate to the outputs. Extending those concepts to a work environment with people doing work, being accountable for something implies having a definition of the work that needs to be done, committing to the work that needs to be done, and doing and delivering that work. Being accountable for something means honoring those commitments, holding someone accountable means measuring their performance, or worth, based on what they’re supposed to do and how well they are doing it. Unfortunately for the creative knowledge work environment, the term is also often equated with concepts of answerability, culpability, liability. Those terms give it a negative connotation when an unsophisticated manager attempts to increase performance by improving accountability – i.e., finding who is culpable for low performance.

    I believe that people mean well and that most of the time, we lack the appropriate communication skills to convey what we really want. I interpret those statements almost as tantrums, as attempts to articulate several different thoughts, feelings, emotions and trying to use language that we haven’t really thought through to achieve a goal we aren’t articulating well. It doesn’t mean there is not a valid, underlying problem that needs to be surfaced and addressed. And that’s our goal – to help guide the problem solving and heal the organization – to understand the underlying problems and address those very directly. While those sentiments are expressed as frustrations often without nuance, they do contain core truth that point to a lack of individual, team, or managerial performance or even a deeper cultural dysfunction.

    When I hear those statements, this is often what I rephrase it into in my head depending on context:

    • We’re losing. We’re not doing well. We need to perform better!
    • We aren’t moving fast enough, I don’t know what to do or what to say to make you move faster!!!!
    • You said you would deliver feature X by Y but we’re LATE, why!!!
    • I have this feeling that people are just checking in and out, working for a paycheck, and they just don’t care!
    • I want to motivate my employees with a powerful speech that gets them fired up toward this new project we need to deliver to grow revenue.
    • I just committed to X to achieve a business outcome, I needed to make a fast decision, and now I have to find a way to get it all done quickly!
    • These people or this individual aren’t performing, it’s clear to me and to others, I don’t know how to articulate why though, it’s just a feeling, so I’m going to use say they’re not being accountable
    • The system keeps going down, nobody cares, it takes ages to bring it back up, where’s the accountability!

    Unfortunately for those well meaning leaders in positions of power, this use of accountability often results in fear and erosion of trust. And that’s not because employees are not accountable (on average) or don’t want to work in a culture of high performance! I believe the broad, generalized use of “we need accountability” is problematic because of several reasons:

    • Most importantly, because generic statements like that meant to inspire greater performance don’t work and lead to disengagement and ultimately lower performance, certainly in the long term.
    • General statements make everyone feel like they’re not performing and their job is on the cutting block. There is no nuance and people start making up stories.
    • They create an us-vs-them mindset, generally feels directed at front-line workers, individual contributors, and rarely seems to imply managers or executive leaders’ performance is in question.
    • Employees remember plenty of occasions where managers or peers were clearly and visibly not performing and not held accountable to that lack of performance, instilling a sense of cynicism.
    • Is unfair to employees in the hierarchical power dynamic, implying it’s entirely the ICs responsibility to be accountable to X and ignoring the cultural and systemic issues that lead to a lack of performance (and potentially a lack of accountability as a driver of that).

    What should we do instead when delivery and operational performance is low and leaders perceive a lack of accountability as the source of that?

    I believe the most valuable thing we can do is to reframe the issue from individual lack of accountability to a systemic, organizational issue focused on ownership. Managers often feel the responsibility and put the pressure on themselves to hold their employees accountable when I firmly believe that, barring critical competency or personality issues, employees want to feel a sense of responsibility and have an inner drive to hold themselves and each other accountable when a sense of ownership over their work exists. Through that lens, instead of telling employees what to do and cracking the whip, managers and leaders should be the gardeners that tend the beds and create the systems to bring out the innate accountability and performance of individuals and teams.

    This type of accountability should first and foremost focus on roles and processes, instead of outcomes. Shipping a specific feature on time, or even expecting a specific business impact from a feature, is a downstream effect that we don’t always directly control. We do control the steps in the process, the working agreements, and how we show up day-to-day, and the continuous improvement of that process. Those are the things we should hold ourselves, each other, and our employees accountable to.

    What does that specifically look like for managers and individual contributors? Managers need to focus on clarity of goals and roles, and ICs need to focus on candid communication, and sharing the information they have through open feedback loops.

    As a manager, get very clear on your organizational and business goals. Organizationally, are you trying to increase overall employee performance? How do you articulate and measure that performance? Ship more volume of features? Have more customer & business impact, defined by some KPI? Ship on time? Be clear on what’s most important (and don’t say “everything”!) and articulate it clearly and repeat it over, and over, and over again.

    Equally as important is to understand the business goals – ideally, the entire cascade from vision, mission, purpose down to your 3-year, 1-year, and quarterly goals. Make it a habit to share those in exactly the same words at least in your quarterly All Staffs, ideally weekly in your department meeting. Then get even more specific on a project or feature level, what customer problem are we trying to solve? What are the business constraints that might drive schedule vs. quality tradeoffs? Context is critical here.

    Then we focus on clear definition of all the involved roles and working agreements. Most importantly, take a look at roles from the lens of the delivery process and be clear on ownership. For each step (ideation, planning, execution, ops, etc.), is it clear who has decision authority? Use a RACI (Responsible Accountable Consulted Informed) or RAPID (Recommend Agree Perform Input Decide) framework for each initiative to create as much clarity and transparency as possible, without which accountability to roles and processes is impossible.

    Lastly, one of my favorite tools as a leader to instill a sense of ownership and accountability are Working Agreements. This often forgotten tool gives the team the opportunity to discuss and decide together how they want to perform and deliver on their work. It should give everyone the opportunity to share how they do their best work and what they expect of others to be successful as a team. Working Agreements can focus on technical aspects of the work (we expect every PR to contain unit tests or if you break the build, fix it before wrapping up for the day) but should also include interpersonal aspects of the work (headphones on means do not disturb or specific agreements on Slack and email usage, how we talk to each other in standups and planning sessions, etc.).

    As a IC, first and foremost, do a self check – are you in the right role? Do you enjoy the work? Do you have the skills you need? Do you resonate with the team’s mission and the company’s overall vision and purpose? Those are important factors that will influence the sense of ownership you can have over your work, and will ultimately deeply impact your work performance (not to speak of your daily moods and general life satisfaction!). Ideally, you’re able to have candid, vulnerable conversations with your manager about these topics, but I realize that is not always the case. Life and career coaches, mentors, and friends and family can be great resources to help you talk and think through those complex topics and may lead you to decide your current work environment is not right for you to thrive.

    Learn to get clear on what you can own, and what you cannot own. Is your role clear, and do you feel the environment allows you to take ownership of particular systems, products, or projects? Speak up if the environment for ownership is lacking. This is a continuous process that happens at the meta level (organization, team, working agreements) and also specifically for each project or feature you work on. Communicate, communicate, communicate. Managers and executives are not perfect and all-knowing, and if there is a gap of expectations you should strive to speak up and address that. Educate yourself on what you can take ownership over and hold yourself (and let others hold you) accountable to, and what you cannot. In other words, create boundaries.

    Lastly, ICs in knowledge work have an incredible , unique perspective over managers that no other industry has to the degree we do. They have deep, expert knowledge of technologies and the systems that comprise the company’s products. It is your responsibility to share that knowledge to help make better decisions!

    What makes for accountable teams?

    • First, clarity on what we’re holding an individual or team accountable to, very specifically. That means, clarity of vision, mission, purpose, and specific business objectives, milestones, deliverables.
    • RACI/RAPID with clearly defined roles. Who is accountable to whom, what does each role get to decide vs. delegate. Clear definition of the authority that those roles and relationships imply. Clear definition of the team in terms of resource allocation – who’s part of the team, who’s not.
    • A collaborative discussion of what you’re committing to and at least some ability to co-define scope. Transparency and courageous engagement are critical to surface all the information needed to make healthy commitments.
    • Open channels of communication and feedback loops along the way, because no matter what you commit to, things change once you set sail.
    • Lastly, maturity to have rational, objective, psychologically safe conversations before the commitment and all along the way via those feedback loops.

    In the next essay, I will go deeper into additional requirements that will make the process of establishing ownership and accountability much more impactful, likely to succeed, and enjoyable for all!