Unglamorous & Bruised: Crossing the Goal Line

Notice the title does not say “Easy.” For the football team in the photo above, pushing the ball over the goal line, isn’t easy, but it is straightforward. Sometimes our work is the same – pushing and grunting something – or someone – over the goal line.

If you reflect on the most impactful and most common organizational dysfunctions, poor accountability has to be on your short list. Some colleagues don’t know their lane, don’t fill their lane, or don’t stay in their lane. Maybe escalation works, but maybe not. Accountability is such a multi-dimensional animal – it’s quite audacious of me to assert that, if you anticipate the right obstacles, you can achieve healthy accountability – bruised but confidently.

1.  Eliminate all accountability expectations pertaining to meetings and email.

You already know that some of your key, most well-intended, stakeholders will be absent from key review meetings and key email chains. Use these channels in good faith to be inclusive and timely, but hope for the best and prepare for the worst. Trying to establish the accountability you need with these two communication channels is not a good bet in the year 2020. Don’t stay at the mercy of others’ busy meeting schedules and email backlogs. Meetings and email are wonderful servants. They are horrible masters. The sole communication channel you can expect accountability is the tangible deliverable, on which the team explicitly collaborated, outside email. With email, you only know people are typing at others; you don’t know if there’s agreement. With meetings, you don’t know if all the necessary conclusions were aired, agreed, and documented. What use are emails and meetings 3-6 months from now?

2. Get the 5 Unambiguous Verbs to 100% Complete

You don’t need 100 verbs to describe your team's work. You don’t need 10. You need 5 – Draft, Review, Revise, Approve, Handoff. Here’s an example using “Training Materials,” but you can substitute anything you want – EVERYTHING you need.

Ideally, you’ll describe these in Microsoft Project so that you can show dependencies, duration estimates, and target dates. But this three-column table works, too.

3. If Someone’s Not Accountable to You, Make Them Accountable to Everyone.

Execution’s two best friends are simplicity and transparency. The 5 verbs above are simplicity. The transparency comes when everyone sees and contributes to this vehicle for governance. There is safety in the transparency and vulnerability. If someone needs to be accountable to you, but they are not, just make them accountable to everyone. If anyone feels something is overkill, adopt and announce the change. That person now owns the methodology, and they own what constitutes success. You didn’t come to fight all the alligators, you just came to cross the swamp. Let public peer pressure do its job.

4. Land the plane.

Something in-flight, healthy or not, at some point, must land. Regardless of the verbs, assignments, and percent complete above, you must bring the work to either a celebratory – or a merciful – close. In a worst-case scenario, even without approvals or signoffs, you must ask the team, “Does anyone want to spend more time on this?” Someone (a formal or a de facto sponsor) may mobilize more attention, and someone may empower you to announce closure. In either case, the vulnerability demonstrates that there is no single point of failure. In fact, anyone on the team could have identified a problem before the team declared closure.

Sometimes work has leadership / sponsorship problems. Sometimes work has followership problems. But this combination of documentation, simplicity, vulnerability, and transparency establishes 3 levels of accountability – 1) who’s doing the work, 2) who’s governing the work, and 3) that everyone has a role in characterizing the work done.

Accountability is often not easy, but the unglamorous metaphors of “landing the plane” and “throwing the team over the goal line,” make accountability straightforward. Healthy or unhealthy accountability, enable the team to move on.

What are YOUR tools to achieve accountability in the most difficult scenarios?