The downside of trying to hold people accountable
Randall Smith | October 2021
This is an excerpt from Breadth and Depth, the PowerLabs newsletter. Sign up below to get the next edition in your inbox.
Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist, recently had a podcast episode that opens with a former senior manager at Boeing talking about how the pressure to deliver 737 Max aircraft led to management practices that ultimately led to two plane crashes and the deaths of 346 people.
Frontline manufacturing managers would be asked to stand up in front of an audience of a hundred people, and they would be asked, Adam, you just told me that you’re going to be, you know, 300 jobs behind schedule today. And yesterday you told me you were going to be caught up. Why are you not able to meet these goals? You know? And it was a very personal, very, public humiliation. Publicly putting them on the spot like that, and kind of grilling them, it sends a very clear and, and chilling message to people.
I know some organizations that try to increase the performance of staff, members, and activists through similar public accountability processes, but the research suggests that these methods don't work — especially when a project involves uncertainty, complexity, and interdependence.
Instead of high performance, attempts to use social pressure and the fear of disconnection to increase performance reduces psychological safety, and ultimately team effectiveness.
Psychological safety is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.
The two consequences of low psychological safety are:
Dangerous silence: people who are aware of the risks of a situation, do not dare to speak up for fear of being called out or punished for it.
Avoidable failure: people are more focused on avoiding failure than getting the most out of their effort. Also, people tend to make more mistakes that could have been avoided if psychological safety levels were high.
Low psychological safety can be particularly harmful to women and people of color. Ruchika Tulshyan, an inclusion strategist, writes in the NYT:
When you’re in the numerical minority or different from everybody else, then you’re going to feel pressure to self-censor,” said Modupe Akinola, an associate professor of management at Columbia Business School. “Just by nature of being one of the only makes an environment feel less psychologically safe.” That’s why this issue is magnified for women of color, she said.
Women are less likely than men to speak up without solid data or the conviction that they’re definitely right about what they’re going to say, so they’ll hold back, Dr. Edmondson said. That’s concerning. That women don’t feel secure enough to speak up at critical junctures is problematic for everyone, especially while navigating the uncertainty of the coronavirus pandemic, she said.
Of course, most women experience the double bind of being perceived as either likable or competent when they speak up. But women of color face additional racial stereotypes. Some Black women feel pressured to modulate their tone so they are not perceived as conforming to the harmful “angry Black woman” stereotype, Dr. Akinola said.
Learn how team leaders can increase psychological safety in this book excerpt from Amy Edmondson, the leading expert on psychological safety.
Over the summer, I read The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months to help me get more done, but the most significant impact was changing how I think about accountability.
Some highlights from the book:
Leaders need to move beyond the limited notion of accountability as consequences. Every organization we’ve worked with talks about holding their people accountable. Accountability cannot be imposed, demanded, or coerced. It is an inevitable outgrowth of freedom. As leaders try to hold their people accountable, it puts people on the defensive and unintentionally produces a victim culture. The very act of holding someone accountable leaves no room for the individual to own their actions or the result. Even the most accountable among us naturally push back.
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Accountability is not about blaming yourself or punishing others. It is simply a stance in life in which people acknowledge their role in outcomes. Accountability is not concerned with fault, but rather what it takes to create better results. Until we and our organizations accept ownership of our actions and our outcomes, we will be helpless to change or improve our results. Once we accept that our actions have an impact on the outcome then, and only then, are we truly empowered to create the results we desire.
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When we acknowledge our accountability, our focus shifts from defending our actions to learning from them. Failures simply become feedback in the ongoing process of becoming excellent. Unfavorable circumstances and uncooperative people don’t prohibit us from reaching our goals. We stand in a different way, thereby creating different results.
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Increase ownership, not accountability. People deliver on what they own. As a leader, one of your main jobs is to foster ownership of the things that matter most. That won’t happen if you continue to try to hold [people] accountable.
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One method that I’ve found to increase ownership across an organization — from member teams to senior staff — is goal setting using the Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) method.
OKRs are a deceptively simple goal-setting technique that can increase a collective commitment to stretch goals, get alignment on a strategy, and help people decide what to do and what not to do each day.
When OKRs are done right, everyone in the organization is part of the process to create them, and they aren’t used to trigger negative consequences for individuals.
Another excerpt from 12 Week Year:
The more you use measurement to trigger negative consequences, the more your team will avoid and even openly resist measurement. Measurement is not accountability; it’s simply feedback. The more effective use of measurement is as a feedback mechanism to identify breakdowns, progress, and successes. In this way measurement allows you to confront reality and breakdowns without the pushback and collateral damage associated with negative consequences.
One method to prevent OKRs from being seen as a tool of negative consequences is to separate the OKR review cycle from the performance evaluation cycle. If they happen during the same period, people will learn to avoid negative consequences by setting easy targets.
Wanna get started with OKRs? The second edition of Radical Focus: Achieving Your Goals with Objectives and Key Results by Christina Wodtke is the best read.
Did you try OKRs, and they didn’t work out? In my experience, the most common cause of failure is the lack of a coherent strategy (and a coherent strategy is rare — partially because many organizations and their programs are shaped by funders, not a base of constituents.)
Performance goals, a mission statement, and a theory of change are all good things, but they aren’t a strategy.
Two excerpts from the book Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why it Matters:
In many situations, the main impediment to action is the forlorn hope that certain painful choices or actions can be avoided — that the whole long list of hoped-for “priorities” can all be achieved. It is the hard craft of strategy to decide which priority shall take precedence.
Nevertheless, strategy is primarily about deciding what is truly important and focusing resources and action on that objective. It is a hard discipline because focusing on one thing slights another.
The actions within the kernel of strategy should be coherent. That is, the resource deployments, policies, and maneuvers that are undertaken should be consistent and coordinated. The coordination of action provides the most basic source of leverage or advantage available in strategy.
The idea that coordination, by itself, can be a source of advantage is a very deep principle. It is often underappreciated because people tend to think of coordination in terms of continuing mutual adjustments among agents. Strategic coordination, or coherence, is not ad hoc mutual adjustment. It is coherence imposed on a system by policy and design. More specifically, design is the engineering of fit among parts, specifying how actions and resources will be combined.
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Good strategy has a basic underlying logic: coherent action backed up by an argument, an effective mixture of thought and action. I call this basic underlying structure the kernel. A good strategy may consist of more than the kernel, but if the kernel is absent or misshapen, then there is a serious problem. The kernel of a strategy contains three elements:
1. A diagnosis that defines or explains the nature of the challenge.
2. A guiding-policy for dealing with the challenge.
3. A set of coherent-actions that are designed to carry out the guiding-policy.
If you don’t have a strategy kernel (or equivalent), you can’t use OKRs.
If you don’t trust teams to develop and carry out coherent actions, OKRs aren’t going to help much.
Christina Wodtke has more reasons why attempts to use OKRs fail. (note: as more organizations use OKRs, Christina's thinking and, as a consequence, my thinking about how to use OKRs has changed.)
When you have a choice between attempting to hold someone accountable vs. increasing their autonomy and ownership, the research suggests the latter is a better choice.
For empowered people and teams to be effective, they need a diagnosis of the challenge, a guiding policy for dealing with that challenge, and processes to coordinate action.
This is an excerpt from Breadth and Depth, the PowerLabs newsletter. Sign up to get the next edition in your inbox.