10.11 Hold yourself and your people accountable and appreciate them for holding your accountable.
Holding people accountable means understanding them and their circumstances well enough to assess whether they can and should do some things differently, getting in sync with them about that, and, if they can’t adequately do what is required, removing them from their jobs. It is not micromanaging them, nor is it expecting them to be perfect (holding particularly overloaded people accountable for doing everything excellently is often impractical, not to mention unfair).
But people can resent being held accountable, and you don’t want to have to tell them what to do all the time. Reason with them so that they understand the value of what you’re doing, but never let them off the hook.
a. If you’ve agreed with someone that something is supposed to go a certain way, make sure it goes that way—unless you get in sync about doing it differently.
People will often subconsciously gravitate toward activities they like rather than what’s required. If they lose sight of their priorities, you need to redirect them. This is part of why it’s important to get frequent updates from people about their progress.
b. Distinguish between a failure in which someone broke their “contract” and a failure in which there was no contract to begin with.
If you didn’t make an expectation clear, you can’t hold people accountable for it not being fulfilled. Don’t assume that something was implicitly understood. Common sense isn’t actually all that common—be explicit. If responsibilities keep falling between the cracks, consider editing the design of your machine.
c. Avoid getting sucked down.
This occurs when a manager is pulled down to doing the tasks of a subordinate without acknowledging the problem. The sucked-down phenomenon bears some resemblance to job slip, since it involves the manager’s responsibilities slipping into areas that should be left to others. But while job slipping can make sense on a temporary basis to push through to a goal, it’s also generally a signal that a part of the machine is broken and needs fixing. The sucked-down phenomenon is what happens when a manager chronically fails to properly redesign an area of responsibility to keep him or herself from having to do the job that others should be capable of doing well. You can tell this problem exists when the manager focuses more on getting tasks done than on operating his or her machine.
d. Watch out for people who confuse goals and tasks, because if they can’t make that distinction, you can’t trust them with responsibilities.
People who can see the goals are usually able to synthesize too. One way to test this: If you ask a high-level question like “How is goal XYZ going?” a good answer will provide a synthesis up-front of how XYZ is going overall and, if needed, will support it by accounting for the tasks that were done to achieve it. People who see the tasks and lose sight of the goals will just describe the tasks that were done.
e. Watch out for the unfocused and unproductive “theoretical should.”
A “theoretical should” occurs when people assume that others or themselves should be able to do something when they don’t actually know whether they can (as in “Sally should be able to do X, Y, Z”). Remember that to really accomplish things you need believable Responsible Parties who have a track record of success in the relevant area.
A similar problem occurs when people discuss how to solve a problem by saying something vague and depersonalized like “We should do X, Y, Z.” It is important to identify who these people are by name rather than with a vague “we,” and to recognize that it is their responsibility to determine what should be done.
It is especially pointless for a group of people who are not responsible to say thing like “We should…” to each other. Instead, those people should be speaking to the Responsible Party about what should be done.
* Source: Principles by Ray Dalio