How to Hold Others Accountable Without Having Them Hate You Afterwards
Using a Simple 5-Step Framework
Once you reach a certain point in your career as a leader, a professional, or a mentor, it becomes critical that you learn how to hold others accountable when they are underperforming.
Strong accountability allows a team to become consistently successful without wasting time, energy, and money.
If done right, it can get people fired-up and motivated to do their jobs quickly and thoroughly. Without accountability, there is no standard for excellence or success, and failure becomes likely.
In my career, I’ve developed a 5-Step framework that has helped me hold others accountable without having them hate me for it at the end of the day. As a software engineering lead working on multi-million dollar projects, I’ve used this framework to compel excellent performance from my teams.
So many people are unsure about how to hold others accountable for fear of creating personal stress for themselves and the other person. I’m sharing what I’ve done and what has worked for me in hopes that it will help you as a leader, a teammate, or even as a family member or friend.
Step 1: Calmly Confront
The first thing you need to do when someone is not performing according to expectations is to accept that confrontation is inevitable. You absolutely can’t be afraid to confront an underperformer, even if it feels uncomfortable just thinking about it. Honestly, tough personal encounters with your teammates are never fun, and it will sometimes lead to hurt feelings. However, it pales in comparison to the pain that you, the person in question, and anyone else involved in the team will suffer if you don’t get over this emotional hurdle.
Before you confront them, make sure that you catch them at a time when no one else is around, or ask them to meet with you privately. The last thing you want to do is embarrass this person in front of others, as they will instantly become defensive or angry. Not to mention, it’s just not cool.
Next, once you’re in a private location with them away from the earshot of others, it’s time to confront the situation. The key to confrontation is to go in very calmly and in an unaggressive manner. Lower your voice, speak politely and matter-of-factly and don’t insert your own opinions into the discussion. If you start the conversation and the person can sense that you’re upset with them or you raise your voice at them, they will shut down and become defensive nine times out of ten.
Calmly tell the person that you’re concerned that they haven’t been meeting expectations lately and you wanted to talk so that you could figure out what’s going on together. Remember, if you’re having this kind of conversation, it’s not you versus them. You’re on the same team, so frame everything during the discussion as a team effort and a team exploration.
Explain what you expected of them and explain what targets they haven’t hit. People will often either admit fault or begin to give you some good reasons why they haven’t been performing if you confront them gently and explain your observations calmly.
Step 2: Ask Questions
Once the conversation is rolling, begin asking questions to get to the root of the issue. Is the person feeling overwhelmed, overworked, or underappreciated? Are expectations, deadlines, and goals clearly defined for them? You might even perform the 5 Why’s analysis together if the issue is deep-seated.
Make sure your questions are specific. For example, if you’re dealing with a sales person and they were supposed to meet a sales goal of 10 new accounts per month, but they only made 5, start asking questions related their inputs.
You may ask, “how many people did you call on last month?” or, “how many times did you follow-up per lead?” to start getting more information on what the significant bottlenecks are to their sales performance. You want to get into the nitty-gritty details until you both understand why he or she is not meeting expectations. At that point, you can begin the process of correcting the root issues and resetting expectations.
It’s imperative not to make any assumptions here. Even if you’ve observed some things that may indicate the problem, listen to the other person and let them give you their reasons. Often, what you may think is the main problem is just a minor distraction in reality. For example, if you might observe that an underperformer is spending time on personal calls. However, there is no real way to know how much time they are spending on personal calls unless you’re following them around all day. That would be creepy!
The reality could be that they spend 20 minutes per day on personal phone calls, and you happen to be around them during segments of those 20 minutes throughout the day. The real issue in this situation could be that your teammate lacks clarity on what their tasking is supposed to be. They could have made the personal phone calls anyway, whether or not they were performing within expectations.
Step 3: Create a Plan, Set Expectations
Once you’ve gotten to the root of the underperformance, you’ll want to help the person create a plan to get them back on track. Sometimes your teammate can get back on track right away after being confronted, now realizing that someone is holding them accountable for their actions. Other times, an underperformer needs more time to get back on track. Giving your teammate time to adjust to the new plan you set together can become necessary if the person is burning out and needs a vacation, or if they’re still learning on the job and need more training resources or help from others to get the job done.
In any case, set an agreed upon plan where the person will make incremental progress to getting back on track. It’s critical that both parties agree to the idea and the implementation details of the plan. If you force a plan upon another person, you’re likely going to have to repeat this discussion the next time a deadline passes, and the work still isn’t done.
Finally, as you’re creating the plan, you must set clear expectations. Frequently, the person underperformed because expectations were unclear in the first place, and so the road to success was ambiguous. You can’t blame the person for this if it was your responsibility to set expectations. After all, you can’t expect someone to hit a target that they can’t even see!
The key to setting strong, clear expectations are using a quantitative, measurable result as the bar for success.
For example, setting an expectation of publishing three articles per week if the work happens to involve writing for a blog or newsfeed. As a software lead, I presented the high-level team goals that we needed to accomplish, and I broke those goals out into individual tasks. I then worked with my team in bi-weekly meetings (we call them to sprint planning sessions in the software engineering world) to come up with estimates for the tasks. After we agreed on estimates, each person committed to jobs that they thought they could accomplish within two weeks (which we call a sprint). This system worked quite well, as everyone on the team had new, clear expectations set every two weeks.
If at the end of the two weeks, someone didn’t meet their expectations, they had to explain to me why they couldn’t meet their expectations. Ideally, if the person ran into any roadblocks during the sprint, we would work together to resolve them so that they could still fulfill their commitments. When expected results are specific and measurable, everyone knows what to aim for, and there is little room for excuses. This is especially true if there is strong accountability throughout.
Step 4: Explain the Consequences
After you’ve established a realistic plan for getting the underperformer back on track and defined clear, measurable, specific expectations for them, it’s time to explain some consequences. Everything in life has consequences, both negative and positive. If people don’t know the potential results of their actions, it’s tough to get them to perform as you’d expect. Therefore, help this person visualize what their career will look like if they meet or exceed the expectations defined in the plan.
Help them understand that their contributions are critical for the success of the mission you are undertaking together. Paint a picture of how the success of the mission will impact your customers or clients. Great teammates and leaders are visionaries who are always looking towards creating a brighter future. Not only that, they get others to buy-in to that vision and help make it a reality. Another thing to keep in mind is that some people can be extrinsically motivated. Let them know what kinds of rewards and recognition they can expect in the future when they consistently complete work in an excellent manner.
Next, get them to see the negative consequences of their actions. Explain to them how their underperformance hurts the entire undertaking and how it affects other people’s careers, including your own. If the underperformance is severe and repeated, you might even ask them if they genuinely want to be part of the team. Honestly, if you have the power to do so, you might have to make a personnel change if the situation is starting to look unsalvageable. If the person in question doesn’t want to be part of the team, doesn’t make an effort to improve, and is continually spreading negativity to the rest of the team, it may be time to let them go. Hopefully, it doesn’t have to get to that point, and you can find a way to help the person regain high levels of performance.
Step 5: Finish with Empathy
You’ve got to remember that at the end of the day, you’re dealing with human beings. These are people who have families, bills, and responsibilities just like you and I. I know the word confrontation has a negative connotation, but it doesn’t have to be an entirely negative thing. Make sure you finish the conversation with empathy by putting yourself in the other person’s shoes. Try to feel how they’re feeling at that moment and then let them know that you understand their feelings and how they ended up underperforming. Let them know that as long as you guys have a plan that involves timely corrective action, you’ll be supporting them when they need more help.
Ultimately, the tone of the conversation should be optimistic and leave the other person with a sense of confidence that you have their back and that you want the best for them. After all, accountability is not about finding a scapegoat or raising yourself above others. Accountability is all about raising others to new levels of excellence and therefore, improving team performance.
Every time I’ve remembered to finish with empathy, my teammate came back later and thanked me for the feedback, commenting on how I was so understanding. If you can follow the first four steps of this framework then finish with empathy, you’ll be surprised with how well your teammate takes it, and how much they improve!
This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by +388,456 people.
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