3 Ways Leaders Undermine Team Accountability

Today’s post is by Roger Schwarz, author of Smart Leaders, Smarter Teams: How You and Your Team Get Unstuck to Get Results (CLICK HERE to get your copy).  Here’s Roger…

Do you see accountability problems in your team? Do your team members need to be more accountable? If so, you may be contributing to the problem.

Here are three leadership behaviors that undermine team accountability. Recognize yourself? If so, there are specific things you can do differently to help the team you lead be more accountable.

You don’t require team members to share their own information.

Eric, one of your direct reports, comes into your office and says, “Janice is driving the project costs through the roof. She keeps changing the standards and it’s delaying implementation.” You and Eric briefly discuss the situation and you say “I’ll handle it.”

How you undermine accountability: The moment you agree to talk to Janice, you’ve shifted accountability from Eric – where it belongs – to you.

How to generate greater accountability:  Keep the accountability where it belongs:  Start by asking, “Have you talked directly with Janice about it?” If Eric hasn’t, get curious. Ask, “What’s prevented you from doing that?” If Eric doesn’t know how to raise the issue with Janice or has had little success, you can be part of the conversation with them. But if you agree to serve as intermediary, you send the message that team members are accountable to you but not to each other.

You don’t raise and resolve team issues in the team.

When you and your direct reports work to solve business problems in team meetings, you notice that team members are usually frustrated with Leslie and Rob. You’re frustrated with them too. They don’t share important information and they make decisions that create problems for other team members. In meetings you can see team members sighing and exchanging knowing glances as Leslie and Rob speak. No one talks about this in the meetings, but they discuss it everywhere else. On the way to and from meetings you overhear your direct reports complaining about it. And you have had one-on-one conversations with some of your direct reports about the situation.

How you undermine accountability: If you talk with Leslie and Rob individually or even together, you shift accountability from the team to yourself. This is not your problem — it’s the team’s problem and you’re just one part of the team. By talking only with Leslie and Rob you send the message that team members aren’t accountable to each other, just to you. If you talk just with Leslie and Rob, they will likely explain how other team members are contributing to the problem. You soon become a human ping pong ball, moving back and forth between Leslie and Rob and other team members trying to understand the situation and solve it. And any solution you generate regarding Leslie and Rob is likely to create problems for those team members who don’t have an opportunity to contribute to crafting the solution.

How to generate greater accountability: Instead, address the team issue in the team — the one place where you have the shared information and people to solve it. It’s fine, ahead of the meeting, to discuss with Leslie, Rob and others that you plan to raise this issue, why it’s important that the full team address it, and even to get their suggestions about how best to raise it in the team. But ultimately, only the team can solve the problem and generate commitment to the solution. That means team members need to be transparent about what has happened, curious about others’ views, and even compassionate toward those who seem to be creating problems for them. Download my short article “Eight Behaviors for Smarter Teams” for the full description of the mindset and behaviors you and your team will need to productively address these issues and get good results while building stronger working relationships.

You do anonymous surveys.

If you lead a team and you receive 360 degree feedback, the responses from your direct reports are averaged and anonymous. If you’re a team member, the same is true of responses from your team peers. If your team takes a survey to figure out how to improve its effectiveness, again, the responses are almost always averaged and anonymous. In all of these situations, you can’t tell exactly who on the team gave a particular rating. That’s by design.

How you undermine accountability: This is the assumption you make when you use anonymous surveys: anonymity will give you the truth. Three problems with this assumption are: anonymity is not guaranteed to yield the truth, anonymity limits accountability, and the lack of accountability makes it difficult — if not impossible — to create the change that these surveys are intended to help create!

How to generate greater accountability: One of the most basic things that team members should be accountable for is giving direct feedback to the team members and team leader with whom they are interdependent. When I work with leadership teams, we agree that each person will be identified by name in the team survey responses. During the feedback sessions, team members routinely ask each other what led them to give the team a particularly rating. This is the kind of conversation that is essential for team members to understand each other’s views and to jointly design a way to improve the team’s functioning.  Of course, having this transparent conversation isn’t easy. It takes either a skilled team or a facilitator who can help the team have these important and challenging conversations.

In all of these examples, you and your team get stuck not simply because of what you are saying or doing but, more importantly, because of how you are thinking — your mindset. As long as you and your team think it’s the formal leader’s job to solve problems for others, the team will continue to get stuck. When you and your team shift your collective mindset so that all team members see themselves as accountable for raising and solving team problems that directly involve them, you’ll change how the team acts and the results you and team produce.

– Roger Schwarz is an organizational psychologist, leadership team consultant, speaker, and president and CEO of Roger Schwarz & Associates. For thirty years he has been a recognized thought leader in team leadership and improving team effectiveness.  A sought after advisor to global companies, federal government agencies and international nonprofit organizations, he is the author of Smart Leaders, Smarter Teams: How You and Your Team Get Unstuck to Get Results (CLICK HERE to get your copy).