Episode #454: How To Hold Staff Accountable

How did it go last week delegating to your team members?

This week we will look at accountability. Having delegated a task, we must make sure that the delegate maintains a strong sense of accountability for the results. If we did a good job selling the delegation to the individual we have chosen for the task, then there shouldn’t be too much to worry about regarding them carrying out the project. The issues arise when we think we were successful in persuading them why this task completion is in their best interests, but we weren’t as persuasive as we imagined.

Business moves quickly and perhaps when we spoke to them, there was some margin in their schedule, but now something else has popped up and they start allocating more time to that endeavour and let our delegated task slip and slide. They are reallocating their priorities and we have a mismatch between what we think is happening and what is really happening. How do we make sure that isn’t the case?

Micro-managing people isn’t effective. Nobody likes to being told in detail what to do, how to do it and when to do it. Our professional sensibilities are insulted. We like to have independence to do the work in the way we think is the most effective and being corrected at every turn creates resentment. Our objective is to have people take responsibility for the work and we want them to be positively motivated, rather than feeling put upon.

Laissez-faire management isn’t effective either. When there are no guidelines and no overview, the inference can be that this project isn’t that important and that it becomes a free choice as to whether it gets done or not. “The boss doesn’t seem to see this project as important, so I won’t either” becomes the dominant self talk.

We need to be in touch with the delegate and the process, to make sure everything is on track. We have to be very clear in our language that they are accountable for the outcome and not just the process. We need to determine just how much interventioin is right. Naturally we may not get this quite correct at the beginning, but we can start with the right level of supervision we think will work and then vary it, if we find we are too heavy or too light.

Beside this intervention weighing dilemma, there are two traps we can fall into:

1. Buying Back the Delegation

Sometimes delegates will try to move the accountability back to the boss. We have to resist this entirely and keep them focused on the work. Some staff have worked out if they make some mistakes early in the process or if they delay proceedings, the boss will get frustrated and then take the whole project off their hands. We shouldn’t fall into that trap.

2. Put everything in Limbo

This is very dangerous. We are not holding the delegate accountable and we are not taking accountability ourselves either. Now nobody is accountable, so obviously the project either doesn’t get off the ground or it stalls. We have taken back part or all of the task and we don’t do anything on it either. We are super busy, we tell ourselves “I will get to this” but we never do. The whole task completion process grinds to a shuddering halt and we are precisely nowhere in terms of progress.

What is the answer? RAME gives us the guideline on how much intervention is needed from our side. RAME is the acronym for Reasonable Allowable Margin Of Error. We set the control limits on how much freedom we will give the delegate to run the task as they want to. If we feel there are minor deviations, which reflect a different way of working toward the same goal, we will ignore them.

This however might be difficult to swallow. With your “superior” level of experience and expertise you may have convinced yourself there is only the one true way of doing this task and all other versions are wrong. It is always educational to have your subordinates approach a task from a new angle and to then realise they have in fact found a better way to complete it than you could come up with. We have to remind ourselves when this happens that “humility is a virtue in leaders!”.

If we see major deviations where the project may be going off track, then we need to intervene to get things moving in the right direction again. We are always encouraging the delegate to learn from the process. We know if they can self-correct, this builds their self confidence, which in turn, helps them with their self-direction and they can get to a stage of self-valuation.

Our ultimate aim here is to develop the abilities of our team and to assist them to move up the ranks, as they show they can operate at the boss’s level. As long as we keep that in mind, we will have the right touch, will find the right words of persuasion and will be flexible about how the project is delieverd.