When we think about accountability, we default to thinking about managers. Managers keep people accountable by telling them what to do, and creating consequences if they don’t do those things.

But people aren’t dogs waiting to be biffed on the nose with a rolled up newspaper for peeing on the carpet. When someone fails to do something they were accountable for (or that their manager thought they were accountable for!), this is almost always down to a lack of clarity, skill or motivation. Clarity is the big one: they didn’t fully understand the task or their role in it, or they weren’t clear on how to prioritise it over other things. Lack of skill is straightforward: perhaps they just aren’t able to do what they’ve been asked to do.

Motivation is more subtle. It’s usually not that people lack any motivation to do their jobs and are continually looking for opportunities to goof off. But often we lack motivation for tasks that are ambiguous or where we don’t understand the purpose. Both of these come back to a lack of clarity again, and more importantly, to a lack of ownership.

Whatever the reason, relying solely on managers telling people what to do isn’t the solution for accountability. We often expect managers to give full clarity about responsibilities in a single conversation, but this is a big ask!

Managers don’t know everything. They don’t know what their report doesn’t know. And they often don’t know what their report does know, the things the report is aware of that will impact on the task. Managers shouldn’t try to be experts in everything their report does – that limits what the team can achieve to just the things the manager knows about in detail. It’s good for a team when different people develop different expertise!

Teams perform best when each person has clear ownership for their responsibilities, and can develop their expertise in those areas. Just telling people what to do isn’t going to achieve this.

What does work for accountability?

Clarity and ownership are the essential ingredients for accountability. And agile can help with both of these.

I talked a couple of weeks ago about how stand-ups can bring much greater clarity on responsibilities. Having quick, regular and structured conversations about what people are working on makes it clear what the expectations are and reveals blockers early. If someone doesn’t understand a task, or doesn’t have the skills to complete it, that should quickly become obvious in your stand-ups. And this shouldn’t be threatening – stand-ups are not a space for managers to catch their teams out. Instead, stand-ups should be a safe space for team members themselves to raise questions and concerns and get support if they need it.

One of the surprising shifts you make in stand-ups is that it stops being just the manager holding people accountable. Instead, the whole team is setting expectations about what’s needed, observing whether people have completed tasks they have committed to or not. And it goes both ways – the team gets to keep the manager accountable to their commitments too.

Stand-ups are my number one tool for creating clarity. But agile can help with ownership too. The shift I just mentioned is part of this, as it gives the whole team a clearer collective responsibility for their goals.

The other big shift is involving people in the decisions that affect their work. Being a more empowering manager gives people the opportunity to affect direction, which in turn gives them more ownership. This works even better if there’s space to create a shared vision for the work, perhaps using one of my favourite meeting formats to get input from the whole team about what you are trying to achieve.

The manager’s role in agile accountability

This might sound like the manager has no role in creating accountability in an agile approach, but that’s just not true. Instead the manager’s focus shifts to creating the structures that create shared accountability. Managers have an important role in modelling behaviour – for example, sharing when they are stuck and need help; or committing to work and sticking to those commitments. They can also use a coaching style to increase accountability, either by making observations (‘I notice we haven’t made any progress with this task for a while now’), or by asking questions (‘What’s realistic here?’, ‘What would you need to finish this by our next meeting?’).

Working in an agile way doesn’t abdicate responsibility for managers. It just helps them shift from a top-down model to a more shared approach to accountability. And ultimately, that’s more effective.

How do you create accountability? Have you found ways to do this collectively?

This is the first in a series looking at the agile approach to areas of our work we often don’t think about enough. Next week, project planning!