The best teams hold themselves accountable

Do you want to build a high-performing, accountable team? Do you want to reduce the amount of time you spend resolving issues among team members? These two issues are tightly related: our research shows that on top-performing teams, colleagues come together immediately and respectfully when a problem arises and talk it through. Not only does this process stimulate more innovation, trust, and productivity — it also no longer requires constant oversight from the boss.

I first saw the connection between high performance and peer accountability years ago when I was working with a highly successful national services company. It had produced unmatched return on capital, breathtaking sales growth, and the highest customer repurchase rate in the industry.

In my first face-to-face meeting with the company’s CEO, whose name was Paul, I made a big mistake. Halfway through the meeting I realized I had mistaken someone else for “Paul.”

It was an honest mistake. At the start, one member of the executive team was missing. He was six minutes late, and the person sitting at the head of the table (I later learned his name was Frank) said, “We all agreed we’d be here at 10 a.m., so what happened?” It was an uncomfortable moment. His teammate flushed, gave a brief explanation, and the meeting continued. From then on I thought the person sitting at the head of the table, the one holding the latecomer to account, was Paul. I smiled at him. He was surprised, but smiled back.

Ten minutes later, Lydia presented the sales report for the business unit. Apparently, things had not gone well. The woman sitting next to me challenged her hard about this disappointing performance. Her comments were thoughtful, constructive, and tough. She concluded by stating how much capital they had spent in Lydia’s business unit that year. I wondered whether she might be the CEO.

The best decision I could make that day was to stay quiet. It later turned out that Paul was the quietest person in that room. I spent the whole time trying to figure out “who is Paul,” and I got it wrong every time. (Since then this has been one of my favorite stories for illustrating the importance of team-member accountability.)

There was something unusual about this team. Later, other teams were studied. We found that teams perform roughly as follows:
• On the weakest teams, there is no accountability.
• On average teams, the boss is the source of accountability.
• On high-performing teams, colleagues manage most performance issues with one another.

Paul did not grill the person who was late, and he did not ask Lydia the hard questions, because he had created a culture of universal accountability. The basic principle was that anyone should be able to hold anyone else accountable for the good of the team. Team members are motivated and able to manage day-to-day concerns with one another, or with anyone outside the team.

We found that you can approximate the health of relationships, the team, and the organization by measuring the average time between recognizing an issue and discussing the issue. The shorter that time, the more accountable the team is, the faster issues get solved, conflict is handled better, and relationships improve. The longer that time, the more room there is for distrust, inefficiency, and intangible costs. The leader’s role is to reduce that gap. And the best method is to grow a culture of universal accountability. There are methods for building such a culture, through which managers like Paul created these norms:

1. Set expectations: Your team members need to know in advance that you expect them, as an accountable team, both to be accountable themselves and to hold others accountable.
2. Tell stories: Raise positive examples of team members examining accountability concerns — especially when being accountable involved real risk for them. Observational learning is a powerful form of influence, and storytelling is the best way for it to happen.
3. Behave like what you want to see: The first time you complain about your teammates to your colleagues — instead of raising the issue directly — you lose your moral authority, and you should expect others to do the same soon.
4. Teach: The best leaders are teachers. Identify the skills you think matter for having “crucial conversations” and teach them in a 5–10 minute meeting. In that training, make sure your team also practices the process in real life. Trust me, they will complain, but this makes a big difference in retaining these skills and transferring them into real life.

The boss’s role is not to solve issues or constantly monitor the team. A good manager should create a team culture in which colleagues examine concerns immediately, directly, and respectfully with one another — what we call an accountable team. Yes, this happens over time, but the return on investment happens quickly if you recover lost time and solve issues better and faster.

Author: Joseph Grenny
Source: Harvard Business Review