Holding colleagues Accountable: boundaries in shared authority settings

For teams in which people collaborate on more or less equal footing, and in which authority is shared, the ability to speak openly with one other when someone is letting the group down is ultra relevant.

In the old model, problems were addressed by the leadership through administering some kind of punishment. In any team which is at least partly self-organizing, which most software teams are, however, it’s better for the team if people enforce each other/themselves.

From the perspective of the product owner or manager, this is the case for a couple of reasons:

a) If you allow yourself to become the sole, unilateral enforcer, the team behaves like teenagers, with you increasingly cast as “dad/mom/school principal” enforcing rules the team thinks they never agreed to

b) There’s not enough time for this. You need to focus on vision, making sure your understanding of the customer is prescient. Since stakeholder whispering and accurate prediction of customer drives is no small feat in transient market conditions, there’s no extra time for addressing small interactional problems inside the team, outside of retrospectives

c) It’s not respectful or ultimately effective to cross the team boundary and get into “how” the team of hopefully mature and qualified professionals are forging a path to excellent fulfillment of your product’s requirements. Overall the team performs better if expected and required to sort themselves out rather than needing a monitor (people really value their autonomy and will do better work if you give them that)

From the perspective of people inside a self-organizing team, it’s obvious you can’t wait around for an authority figure to come and sort out your problems. First of all said authority figure is probably in a meeting with a stakeholder, not sitting down next to you while you pair program with your colleague. Second of all, you value your right to solve your own work problems together with the team without undue outside interference.

So you need to speak up, when your colleague delivers substandard code, or when she skips standup for the 15th time this month. At the latest this speaking up should happen in retros, but ideally it even happens on the spot, for a faster feedback cycle.

So what’s the problem? Why don’t you say, “Hey dear trusted friend and colleague who I like and want to like me too always, please redo this work, it is really not good enough for us to make it to excellence”? If you can and do say that, bravo, please share with others how you are able to do it — in my experience this is a rare skill (not to be confused with blunt/insensitive people who don’t mind hurting colleagues — that is also destructive to team work).

You can probably identify your own barriers to speaking a negative opinion freely, by imagining having to tell someone you like and respect that you’re going to work with everyday for the next years that you think their behavior or quality is a problem, but here are some other thoughts people have that stop them from speaking out:

Who am I, I’m not the boss. I don’t want to tell him what to do.

I want him to like me, not think I’m uptight, bossy, etc.

What if I’m wrong? I don’t want to be that guy who was a jerk & then wasn’t even right about it.

Better not create problems, what’s it to me. Someone else will address it.

I’m not perfect either, I don’t want him to flame on me later.

Many of us have entrenched social programs running in our minds that inhibit us from easily holding each other to our agreements, mainly related to the desire to be accepted, not rock the boat, and to not cause each other pain through awareness of personal weaknesses. We may also have fear of counterattack, feel a codependent urge to protect the other from their own natural consequences, or just have a default Omerta’ setting.

To overcome these social programs, you have to be pretty committed to excellence (to want that more than you want to be liked and accepted), or to be fairly confident in the relationship you have, that it is strong enough to withstand challenge and potential anger and hurt.

Problems arise, in general, when a team’s commitment to being non-confrontational with each other supersedes its commitment to excellence, as the team won’t likely make it through the conflict stage, which is only level 2 of 5 needed to get to excellence according to Lencioni’s model. Not being able to hold others accountable is a passion-killer and will also eventually cause even the most committed of employees to do the psychological equivalent of picking up his toys and going home.

There are causes and conditions (namely a high trust team culture paired with explicit working agreements about demanding the best from each other, even if it’s uncomfortable socially) that make it more seamless to challenge each other, but it also boils down to each individual’s ability and willingness to do the probably uncomfortable work of speaking a boundary.

Practice is in order. Practice speaking directly about problems, about why they’re problems, and what you want instead. Practice acknowledging a quality or behavior problem without using blaming language; practice being self-responsible, emotionally neutral, and fair while still speaking an unpleasant truth out loud. Practice acknowledging yourself and knowing that your point of view, while not the ultimate and most absolute of all truths, is important and necessary in the team.

Template time: below I have pasted a way to communicate which is empirically less likely to inflame the listener, while still getting the point across. You may also want to check out my article on Empathetic Reflection, Harmless Communication, Conflict Resolution Tips, and Boundaries.

Enjoy, and as always feel free to contact with me with comments about your experience or questions about implementation in your context.

Thanks!

hollymaehaddock@gmail.com

~~

Template for Holding Someone Accountable

I. I noticed [neutral, inarguably true description of events]

II. This is a problem for me/the team because [neutral, inarguably true statement of how it affected you/how you see it impacting team]

III. (If appropriate) We have a working agreement that [x,y,z]

IV. What is your point of view? What do you think?

V. (Reflect compassionately): Ok, I can understand that — so from your point of view, you need/want [x,y,z]

VI. (Collaborate on a solution) How do you think we should resolve this?

VII. (Agree on how to implement and measure) How will we measure whether this solution works? How long do we need?