My name is Matthew Whittemore and don’t keep people accountable.
In late January I started a blog initiative inside the Social Tables Engineering Team. As developers learning and sharing is important and we hoped that codifying what we are working on would help us communicate better. As a team we agreed one blog post a week was a good idea, and I took on the task of making sure that weeks team member delivered their blogpost.
In all of February we didn’t publish once. In March we got one done. In April I again failed to keep my team mates to their deadlines and nothing was published. As May was coming to a close, and it looked like we were going to have two completely silent months, I had to admit to myself that I suck at keeping people accountable. Stressed, I confessed this to the team.
Looking at the rate of blog posts over the next few weeks seems to say that admitting that I was bad at keeping people accountable helped me keep people accountable as we quickly published 3 blog posts. But having admit this to myself I couldn’t just settle with a small rate of improvement and knew I needed to start learning how to be better at keeping people accountable.
Over the next few weeks I tried a handful of techniques that my co-workers suggested. Keep lists. Send Calendar invites. Have clear goals. Give deadlines. All of them have been somewhat helpful but none of been the silver bullet I’d love to see.
As I continue to read and think about how I can be better at this I can’t help but realize that a large part of keeping others accountable is about keeping yourself accountable. Calendar invites help, but if I don’t keep myself to accountable to using that calendar invites as a follow up opportunity I might as well have not sent it at all. Clear deadlines help, but if I don’t follow up leading up to that deadline it might as well have not been sent.
The engineering team still doesn’t publish blog posts weekly, so I’m not an accountable expert yet. But we are doing two-ish a month so things are looking up and I am hopeful that by the end of this year we will see at least month of weekly posts.
