A Manager’s Guide to Holding Your Team Accountable

This resource first appeared in issue #83 on 17 Jul 2021 and has tags Strategy: Alignment, Becoming A Manager: Feedback, Managing A Team: Other

A Manager’s Guide to Holding Your Team Accountable - Dave Bailey

A lot of research computing team managers - especially those of us who came up through the research side - aren’t great at holding the team accountable. It’s pretty easy to understand why - the whole idea of being accountable for timeline and scope is a bit of an awkward fit to that world. Something took longer than expected, or someone took a different tack than they had committed to earlier? I mean, it’s research, right? If we already knew how to things were going to go ahead of time, it wouldn’t have been research.

But supporting research with computing and data is a different set of activities, and to give researchers the support they need we need to hold team members accountable for their work, and team members need to hold each other - and you - accountable. Mutual accountability is what separates a team from a bunch of people who just happen to have similar email addresses.

So going from a role in one world to one in the other takes some getting used to. It’s easy, as Bailey reminds us, for accountability conversations to feel confrontational - maybe especially to the person starting the conversation. But he summarizes our role as:

Asking probing questions about what happened
Clarify our report’s explicit and implicit commitments
Deliver feedback clearly and constructively

In particular, he distinguishes between “holding someone to account” and “giving feedback”. Holding someone to account involves clarifying the expectations and asking probing questions about what happened; giving feedback means providing your reaction about what has unfolded.

There are familiar points here for longtime readers - Bailey includes discussion of the Situation Behaviour Impact (SBI) feedback model - but distinguishing between holding to account and feedback is useful and new, and the article is worth reading. Bailey also gives a helpful list of probing questions:

What were you trying to achieve?
What was your plan?
What options did you consider?
What drove your decision?
What actually happened?
How did you react?
When did this happen?
What did you learn?
What would you do differently?

As well as some starting points for accountability conversations.