S3E9 – Accountability Without Knowing

Show Notes

In this episode, Mon-Chaio and Andy delve deep into the nuances of accountability at high organizational levels, particularly within the C-suite. They explore the challenges of holding executives accountable for outcomes, especially when their roles and processes are not fully understood by their peers. The conversation includes discussions on the differences between process and outcome accountability and how each can be applied depending on the context. Ultimately, they highlight the importance of team cohesion, shared goals, and trust in building a high-performance, accountable organization.

References

• Radical Candor
• We Hold Ourselves Accountable: A Relational View of Team Accountability
• The Best Teams Hold Themselves Accountable
• The Effect of Outcome vs. Process Accountability-Focus on Performance: A Meta-Analysis
• Accountability Systems and Group Norms: Balancing the Risks of Mindless Conformity and Reckless Deviation

Transcript

Mon-Chaio: Hello, Andy. We’re back this week. Talking about something that we previewed at the end of last week’s episode, right? Specifically around accountability. And we’ve talked about accountability before, but I think last week we said we want to focus this week on accountability in areas like the C suite, where you’re trying to hold people accountable, but you don’t really know what they do.

Or how they work. I think the example we gave is if you’re a CTO and the CFO is saying, well, my financial models missed something and I’m updating them. You don’t really understand how to build a financial model, or what a 7 plus 5 is, or what free cash flow means different than EBITDA. How do you hold that person accountable?

And I think we said, look, let’s dive into it, let’s try to find research, let’s try to figure out tactics. So, how far did you get on that?

Andy: I did a little bit of research. I read parts of Radical Candor. I actually had a chat with Gemini, the Google AI system.

Mon-Chaio: Uh huh.

Andy: Just to see what it would come up with. And actually I had a little bit of a lightbulb moment with these, um, LLMs.

Mon-Chaio: Mm.

Andy: Because I was trying to come up with an association of what I was thinking of to other things.

Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.

Andy: And It kind of dawned on me, well an LLM is really just about what is a probable association from these words to something else.

Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm. Absolutely.

Andy: And so actually I thought, well, this can be a useful thing. I can just kind of prompt it to do things and see what comes out.

Because that’s basically then telling me what could be associated. So it gave me a couple interesting ideas that I went down. And I, I found a little research on different ways of doing accountability, which I think are going to be relevant for talking about the CTO dealing with the CFO, where they’re really not sure what that CFO does or what a financial department does, what accountants are doing, what they’re doing in the tax filing sections of the company and all of that.

Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm. Well, it sounds like you had a slightly better experience with your LLM than I did with mine.

Andy: Like,

Mon-Chaio: I was, uh, not using Gemini. I was using ChatGPT. And originally I was using it to help me find papers and steer me towards research. And it did the thing that it often does, which is gave me hallucinated articles of papers.

It would Give me a paper title that sounded really interesting

Andy: oh, that’s perfect. That sounds like exactly what I want to know.

Mon-Chaio: Yeah, and then it would Give me the link to the paper, which was titled something completely different And was not about that topic. Uh, and then when I told it, it was hallucinating. It would give me real papers.

And then when I told them that I already read those papers, it would give me the hallucinated papers again. So that was fantastic. Um, and then I decided to say, okay, well, let’s forget the research and the papers. Just tell me if I was a CTO trying to. Hold a CFO accountable, what, uh, what tactics it would give me.

Um, and, you know, there were, I wouldn’t even say minor lightbulb moments, there were interesting thoughts. But, um, honestly, they were very internet blog like. A lot of the stuff that we talk about that’s written out there,

Andy: Yeah.

Mon-Chaio: un nuanced as to be, not so useful. Things like, well, you want to have constant communication channels.

You want to have transparency of information. Um, which again, of course,

Andy: Yeah. It’s like, yes, you, you want to hold them accountable. You want to talk to them and you want to have trust. And I was like, yes, but I don’t know what to, how to interpret what they’re telling me,

Mon-Chaio: right, absolutely. So,

Andy: which is why I first went to radical candor. I thought, well, maybe this is a thing about radical candor. And, and I think it is,

Mon-Chaio: okay.

Andy: but the book didn’t help me too much. Cause it’s, it’s things that we’ve talked about before.

Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.

Andy: we’ll probably touch on it, but I’m not going to say that it’s radical candor.

Mon-Chaio: Gotcha. Okay. Well, it’ll be interesting. I think my research mostly turned up stuff around how to build an accountable organization and the research around what types of organizations tend to show high accountability versus low accountability, which I think is a little bit tangential to what we want, but I think is an interesting thing to think about to say.

If you try to build a high accountability organization, does that then help you back into the tactics that you may need to employ in order to hold these folks that you don’t know what they do to account? So that’s kind of where my research led. Um,

Andy: And did you come to a conclusion? Did you find tactics in that or approaches that they suggested that you thought that might help?

Mon-Chaio: you know, I did find some interesting nuggets about what a high accountability organization looks like But I don’t think it really helped me to dig into the okay saying something I don’t understand and I have to try to hold them accountable because their results are not what we want and we want to hold them accountable for their results, right, which is a tactic, but how can I hold them accountable for their results when I can’t parse the reasoning for those results?

Andy: hmm. Mm hmm. Right. So right there, you’ve touched on the thing that I found,

Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.

Andy: which is in the research I was looking at, there’s two forms of accountability. There’s what they called process accountability, and there’s outcome accountability.

Mon-Chaio: hmm.

Andy: And I thought that this was really interesting because When I thought about these things, I’d never kind of broken it down before, and it started to spark ideas in my mind about what’s going on here, and you just touched on it by saying, like, they’re telling me this stuff, and they’re not getting their results, but how can I understand their process, and that, I think, is the crux of the matter, because it’s a question of, are people accountable for the results, or are they accountable for following a particular known process? And I think in a lot of cases, if we kind of take this down out of the C suite for a little bit, this is a place where I think a lot of managers, a lot of leaders really struggle, is because we’re much more comfortable when we came from that discipline, like I’m a software engineer, I know when I’m working with software engineers, I know the process they should be following.

And so if they account to me the process they’re following, I understand what they’re talking about. And I have this belief that that process will lead to the right results and, I can then understand what’s going on and I can go along with it. But, when I try to apply that same thing to something that I don’t understand, like,

maybe someone in UX, I’m, I’m not very familiar with UX and UX research. If they start giving me an account of everything they’re doing, I feel much less assured about what’s happening.

Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm. Mm

Andy: And that’s because I’m going for process oriented. accountability. But the thing is, and we’ve talked about this before, is, no, you want to hold people more responsible for results. And so we should be actually asking about results oriented accountability. Now the difference in this is, if someone tells me the steps that they took, and they tell me why those were the steps that they took, that’s the process oriented. If they tell me the outcomes that they’re getting, and maybe a little bit of information about why those things are happening, that’s results or outcome oriented.

accountability. Now, the thing about outcome oriented accountability is you have to be very clear on what you’re trying to get, and with process oriented accountability, you have to be very clear on what the steps are,

Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.

Andy: and you don’t care very much about what you get out of it, because you just believe that the steps produce what is needed, and on outcome, you don’t care too much about the steps, because you’re kind of going off of an expectation that, uh, the steps don’t matter.

It’s only the outcome that really matters.

Mon-Chaio: So. Don’t you think, though, that many people use both, where,

Andy: and this this got into then when should you use them?

Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.

Andy: So the thing was is when you should use them based on the research was a little counterintuitive

Mon-Chaio: Interesting. Okay.

Andy: So what they found was each one produces a different pressure on people’s actions

so If the steps you need to take are already well known, so for instance, in accounting, there’s something called the gap rules.

Mon-Chaio: Mm

Andy: If those exist, then there is a reasonable thing in their accounting that they should be, uh, using them. And so, if you were to use, uh, outcome based accountability, or outcome accountability, what would happen is that people would have a pressure to come up with novel ways of doing their accounting, which is not what you want.

And if you, if you use process based,

Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

Andy: the assumption then in the accounting, the pressure that comes in the culture is that there is one way to do this.

Mon-Chaio: They’ll follow the generally acceptable process.

Andy: Yeah, you’ll follow that general process and you’ll get the right results. But if, if there is no well known process. Or if the process is known to produce the results that are undesired at that time,

Mon-Chaio: hmm.

Andy: they’ll be doing the wrong thing. So what this came up with was you actually have to change your accountability based on the situation that you’re in,

Mon-Chaio: Yeah.

Andy: which to me was a little counterintuitive.

I was like, no, no, accountability is accountability. You just come up with it and you say. Give me an account and, and you default to whichever one is kind of, makes the most sense. The, the research actually went a little bit further and they, they found that different kind of groups, norms, will by default set different ways of providing accountability

Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.

Andy: you will sometimes want to do something that’s not the norms of that group because you get the different result.

Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm. Yeah, I mean, I think that makes a lot of sense and it is an interesting way to think about it.

Andy: But how does it help this?

Mon-Chaio: Well, I mean, how does it help? This is a question. I think I’ve seen it often in sports situations. I think if you look at the way different teams and coaches communicate, uh, there are some coaches that I’ve seen communicate in believe in the process. Right, like obviously we’re all outcome oriented.

We all want to win games and increase the standings, but believe in the process because short sample sizes, small fluctuations can change outcomes. But like, as long as we think the process is working in the right process, we will get to where we need to go over a larger sample size. And then of course, there are the coaches that focus very, very much on the outcomes. Right, the do whatever it takes, the outcomes are all that matter, the wins and points are all that matter. Um, and so the process can change behind the scenes. I don’t really care how you’re working, um, if at the end of the day you’re showing me that you’re able to produce results. So, I can absolutely see this idea of how a culture influences what type of accountability you’re going to put in.

And even the players, when you hear their after game interviews, you hear things like, Well, we played the right way, as long as we continue that forward, you know, we will get better results than today. Uh, versus you can imagine what the outcome based, uh, type of interviews might seem like. But in the business world, In my personal example, I often think that I try to start with outcome based accountability and then move to process based accountability when I can’t get what I need from the outcome side.

So, as an example,

Andy: Is this like a diagnosis? You’re hearing the outcome and you’re like, the outcome doesn’t seem to be happening. Now account to me for your process so I can help you diagnose what’s happening.

Mon-Chaio: Yes, absolutely. And especially when the outcome based accountability is over time not producing what I want, right? Again, small sample size versus large sample size. So if an engineering group comes in and says, Hey, in this two week meeting on status, um, our KPIs here are slipping a little bit. Um, but we feel like we have this.

This is a, interim thing and it’s because of X, Y, or Z. I don’t feel like I have to take them into account as long as their explanation sort of makes sense, right? You may pressure test it a little bit, but that’s just sort of asking questions say, okay Well in the next two weeks then I want to be able to see this move or they may say it’s not going to move For four weeks, but in six weeks, we’re going to see this start to get better.

Okay, that’s great But if week by week we’re coming in and it’s like oh, um what we thought for last time wasn’t the case. And then what we thought for last time again, wasn’t the case. And then again, wasn’t the case. Then I tend to dive down into process based accountability and say, well, how are you projecting this?

What were you doing that made you think it would change? How are you thinking about that work and what are the changes that you’re making? Are you making them fast enough? Are you focused in the wrong direction? Right? So for me, it’s often very hierarchical in the way that I, apply these accountability systems.

Andy: think it’s an interesting thing, because what I’m hearing is you’re starting from the position of my role within this, I have certain needs. I need to know that the outcomes are occurring. And at this point, I think we can actually take it back to the CTO, CFO, CEO, that, that area. So as a CTO, I have certain needs.

I need to know that we have money, that there’s a stable financial system here that allows me to execute on the strategy that we’ve agreed on for technology. And the outcome account that you get from the CFO doesn’t provide the clarity that you need to feel assured that, yes, we do have the outcome that I, that I would need in order to run the organization, uh, for technology.

And so your normal mode, and my normal mode as well, I do this exact same thing, is to then start switching into. What on the surface appears to be a process oriented accountability, but in reality is actually coaching

Mon-Chaio: Interesting.

Andy: you try to apply that to the CFO, you very quickly realize I have nothing to coach

Mon-Chaio: Right. I think that’s

Andy: and, and so that, and I think maybe that’s the problem is that you’re, we’re, and I’ve done this, I think as well, Where I start going down that line and then I’m like, but I don’t know how to interpret anything I’m hearing here. And now I’m upset. I feel like this has gone wrong. And what’s gone wrong is not the accountability, actually.

But it’s that I thought I was asking for accountability, but really what I was doing was a coaching session. and of course, yeah, that’s not going to work. So we have to think, okay, and maybe this is where the radical candor comes in. Because I thought it was, I thought it was going to be useful. But the radical candor is about having that ability to say something, but care deeply about who you’re talking to. And in this case, it’s the CEO, CTO, CFO are a team. They do need to have that relationship, that trust, and that relationship to have those difficult conversations. And in this case, it’s, it’s to be able to say, I, I believe that you are doing what, needs to be happening, but the account that you just gave when you said X, I don’t have assurance from that, that I’m going to be able to hire these next three engineers that I need to run this part of our strategy, help me understand where we really are, because I’m not getting this and doing that kind of, it’s basically, it’s turning it back on yourself for realizing you had a need, you have an unmet need without going into the coaching of like, Oh, I have an unmet need. Now let me coach you on how to get my need met.

Mon-Chaio: it that way, it kind of turns accountability on its head a little bit. At least for me, right? When I normally think about accountability up until really, you said that I think about something’s not happening, something that needs to happen, and you are helping facilitate that thing to happen. And so in some ways, in my mind, how can you do that without coaching?

If the CFO says for the 13th month in a row, Well, this model is getting very close. I know it was still 20 percent off like it was six months ago, but, um, you know, I have some AI processes in the background running and I have this new team that’s building up these new projections. It’s getting very close to me. Accountability isn’t okay, but you better deliver those results because I can’t move. Accountability is because I think I don’t know. Maybe that is accountability. But for me accountability has always been You’re not going to deliver those results because History has shown that you’re not and when we dig into it, it seems it’s very your systems and models Uh in this case i’m thinking about team models and thought process models not financial models are systematically broken And so you can’t and my, the accountability I’m providing is telling you that you need a completely different way to think about things to change what you’re doing to, um, get more feedback or whatever case may be. Maybe that’s not accountability. Maybe to your point, that’s closer to coaching.

Andy: And it might be that when you find yourself having to go into that, that, that should be the signal to say, maybe we need to approach this differently. Because I, I’m not in the position to coach you. I’m not in the position to help you understand what’s, what’s going on so you can, we can achieve this. So let’s talk at the level we’re at about what we can do to help you.

Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.

Andy: And, and actually now what we’re asking for is not a process accountability of the process that they’re using to get those results, but a process accountability of the process they’re using to do something different next time.

Mon-Chaio: I love it. You’re right. You’re right. Because so many of those things, it’s We don’t have trust that next time is going to be different. And so what you’re asking them for, how are they going to be accountable that their process will make next time different and help us gain that trust?

Andy: Yeah. And, and that ties to, to what one of these papers said, which is, Um, It says, Decision makers who are accountable for outcomes will be pressured to try to predict the unpredictable, and they will likely do so in vain. In these situations, outcome accountability can cause excessive deviation. Meaning that they’re going to just go off and do who knows what.

Mon-Chaio: hmm.

Andy: But process accountability can reduce these errors by increasing attentiveness to decision rules. And so it really becomes that question of which decision rules Should we be bringing that attention to? And I think what we’re hitting on is the decision rules are not the rules of execution. It’s the rules of improvement.

Mon-Chaio: Right. I like that a lot. And that does help me think about it a little bit differently because Now you’re not holding them to account necessarily for their process or their outcome as much as maybe you’re saying, let’s figure out, for example, what, what can we see in two days that helps us have more confidence than in 30 days, things are going to be better, right?

Can we apply a smaller version of your financial model to a smaller subset of data? Um, that we understand better, or have you thought about benchmarking this with, uh, competitor companies? Can we do a quick benchmark to see whether our trend lines are aligned that help us feel more confident? I, I guess that’s kind of coaching, but

Andy: That’s kind of coaching. I think, I think what you’re getting into there though is once again the, the execution. Whereas I think the improvement, uh, focus would be more on questions of tell me your assessment about why we’ve been getting the results we are getting. What is standing in the way of getting the results that we think that we want? And what’s something you could try that you haven’t done yet that might tackle one of those? And which one would it be?

And in that case, I don’t need to know anything about their financial modeling. I just need to know that they’ve thought through those steps.

Mon-Chaio: you don’t, but if we bring it back to stuff that we know well, engineering,

Andy: Mm hmm.

Mon-Chaio: Haven’t you heard this from engineers before when you tried that inquiry system where they’re every week it’s a little bit different, right? It’s like, oh, now I know what’s going on with this bug that should have been fixed six weeks ago, but now we’re going to try this and it’s really close to working.

And then next week it’s like, oh, well, that didn’t work either. But now I know what’s going on.

Andy: Yeah, I, I, I get it. Yeah, absolutely. Cause, like, oh man. The number of times where I’ve encountered that and I’m just like, Uh, you’re not thinking about it right.

Mon-Chaio: Exactly, yeah. Mm hmm. Mm

Andy: going in circles now. And I think this is where it’s a little different at that executive level.

Kinda, like, This, this is the point at which there is no backstop.

Mon-Chaio: hmm.

Andy: So you kind of have to have, uh, a bit of faith that they do have enough experience to see other things. But it might be that you also are thinking about it, and you’re like, I’m not, this might be a rubric that you might bring in about, like, improvement.

Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.

Andy: I’m not hearing anything about getting, um, external validation of what we’re doing.

Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

Andy: And you might say that, that’s, uh, that’s Triggering something in me is this something we could just take to another person and get their take on a fresh set of eyes? Another expert.

Mon-Chaio: And it’s interesting you mentioned that. That is the one nugget that I got out of my LLM that suggested bringing in fresh eyes, other people with expertise to help validate things that you don’t know.

Andy: Yeah.

Mon-Chaio: Yeah. Um, the other thing, That I found was getting a little bit away from the tactics. And I don’t know if this is helpful, but maybe we can explore just a little. Is, it seems like the research around accountability really comes down to accountable teams have a sense of team identity, culture, and cohesion that allows them to own team goals.

Andy: Yep. It sounds just like the five dysfunctions

Mon-Chaio: Absolutely, right? And there’s a lot of research around when sub teams form, uh, it makes it very difficult. Um, when you give teams a goal together, they actually end up communicating more, uh, than when you give separate goals. And it triggers in me this thinking that at the C suite, perhaps because all of these disciplines are disparate, you end up with this conversation around finance owns the finance goal.

While technology owns the technology goal. And it’s really funny. I was in a, uh, I was in a KPI review the other day. I see you making triangles with your

Andy: Yeah, I was thinking like but those those two goals. Yeah, there’s a finance goal There’s a tech goal, but those are all subservient to some other thing. They shouldn’t be independent

Mon-Chaio: I, yeah, no, I agree. I think. Those goal hierarchies are so important and those KPI hierarchies of rolling them up are so important, but as your organizations get larger and larger, sometimes the place at which they meet is so abstract to an individual being able to look at something. So in a C suite level, you might be looking at revenue, quarterly revenue. And I mean, let’s take your CTO example. You’re like, well, I mean, I shipped all the features that I felt like we needed to ship. But there was a misprojection on what the customer wanted. Like, how can I actually contribute to revenue? I can’t, um, I’m just a peg, right? A piece of the puzzle. But I think that there is something about holding the entire team accountable, the entire C suite accountable for those results.

I was mentioning, I was in a meeting where we were presenting quarterly numbers or something, and, uh, we had KPIs and it said. Um, or we had OKRs, and we had 5 was being communicated by the CFO, right? And OKRs 2 and 4 were being communicated by sales. And OKR 6 was jointly being communicated by X or Y. And I see a lot of that breakdown, and I understand it, right?

It’s like, how can I be responsible for a sales pipeline thing? I have nothing to do with it. But I think what the research says is, as maybe as unreasonable as it seems, The more that you can say, no, you are responsible for the sales pipeline, uh, CTO

Andy: Mm hmm.

Mon-Chaio: you as a group are responsible for all of this. The more the group ends up working together and building that identity to then be able to hold each other accountable, whether it’s learning a little bit about something, CFO.

Can we bring him in and validate, um, that sort of a thing.

Andy: Yes. Yes, I think so. I think you’re right. That the more everyone feels that they are sharing those goals, the more they are a team. And in fact, it is one of the definitions for a team that we’ve even worked with, which is that it’s a group of people who share a goal.

Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.

Andy: And so if they’re sharing those goals, then they will work together.

They won’t understand it all, but over time, Like the CTO will start understanding some of the finance jargon, and we’ll start getting a sense of what is EBITDA.

Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.

Andy: But I think the other thing is also in, especially in a group where you’re trying to do something a little different. If each person is only responsible for giving a process oriented accounting of things, thinking through what, what these different things pressure on people, what you’re saying is there is a clear process that we should be following, which makes sense in kind of like a mature product space, where you have a sales cycle, you have an identified customer, you have identified renewals that have to happen.

In which case, yeah. Get a process oriented account of what’s going on because there’s a known process that you can compare it to, and you can say, Ah, alright, this big customer is at this point in the renewal cycle, and this is the account manager reaching out to them, this is the response they got, this is how we’re doing, we’re 80 percent confident we’re going to get the renewal, and everyone can look at that and say, cool, that’s great.

Doesn’t take tech understanding too much or anything. It doesn’t take tech involvement too much, really. But if you’re in more of a, we’re still working out exactly how this is going to work, how, how we sell it, what we’re selling, how we need to interact to get that next sale for integrations or customizations or whatever it is, if you focus on process, what you’re saying is don’t deviate to get an outcome. But if you focus on the outcome and everyone’s sharing all those different sub goals. Then you will push for deviation from standard process because they’ll be like, you know what, this customer is complaining about this, but we think that adding that would be a really great feature. Can we change the roadmap?

Yeah, let’s change the roadmap. Let’s get that in there. Nice.

Mon-Chaio: So the last wrench I think I can throw into this conversation is we might just start, we might start aligning and remember last week we talked about the five dysfunctions and. We talked about commitment, then accountability, then results, I think, is, is where we ended up. And now we’re saying, well, this whole team ownership of goals helps you get past maybe process oriented accountability, more towards outcomes.

Um, the uncomfortable thing of having everyone own goals, even though they may not know anything about them or feel like they have. any ability to adjust or to impact that goal may force them to do to find creative ways in order to impact that goal or improve their understanding to be able to meet that KPI or accountability. This research paper, which was a kind of a meta study or review of other research papers, had this quote, though. They said, a second unanticipated result is that accountability did not meaningfully predict financial performance when previous performance and effort were included as predictors. Our interpretation, this is later on, is that ultimate performance is often somewhat outside the control of the team.

In the simulation, for example, this is they ran a simulation, uh, an experiment, a controlled experiment. Financial performance depended in part on decisions of competitors and market conditions.

Andy: hmm. Mm hmm.

Mon-Chaio: So now,

Andy: So I, I, I was like, did you find the same paper I did? I don’t think you did, but I found another one that was a meta analysis of different accountability.

Mon-Chaio: Uh huh.

Andy: And what they found was, because what they were looking for was, is there a clear, like, process accountability is better than outcome accountability?

Mon-Chaio: Mm. Mm hmm.

Andy: it doesn’t seem like there’s one is better than the other. They’re just different.

Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

Andy: It says accountability focused by itself cannot serve as the sole motivator of better performance.

Mon-Chaio: So, and then, Here’s a line I really like also. It says, Accountability expectations are not a performance panacea, although they do encourage greater time investment in shared goals and precede measurable improvements in some dimensions of concrete task performance. And maybe this is where I personally have been getting to, which is I think accountability is important because it helps build team cohesion.

Team trust, and I think that unlocks higher performance for whatever we mean by performance And not so much that accountability is important because it actually helps achieve that specific kpi Because we’re being accountable for it and then that kpi drives business performance so Then rolling back to what we were just talking about, which is let’s put a goal on the team, even if they don’t feel like individual members can move that goal needle. I think it’s less important whether they can or cannot move that goal needle and whether that actually impacts that KPI or performance. It’s more about triggering the culture and thought process changes that happen to get that team to work closer together because we feel like that. can deliver higher performance for the organization.

I think that’s where I’m landing, personally. What about you?

Andy: I think, I think I’m at the same place as well, which is. Accountability isn’t the thing that drives the higher performance. Accountability is the thing that acts as the feedback mechanism into the team that they are working as a team.

Mon-Chaio: Mm. Mm That’s a good way to put it.

Andy: Yeah, so, and, and, and, so you get that feedback mechanism, and now they trust each other more. And going through those dysfunctions. Once you get that accountability, you get more trust. And now it’s, you’ve got this nice feedback cycle between, uh, trust, and now they can commit, and now they can, uh, give better accounts to each other, and then they have more trust.

And as you get that team that’s actually working together, that’s where you get the performance. Accountability by itself doesn’t get you that. Accountability just gets you the feedback. Heh heh heh.

Mon-Chaio: I love it. This was an interesting conversation. I, uh, did not think about that, uh, prior to us talking about it, but, uh, it makes a lot of sense in my mind. Um, yeah, and I don’t think this means that you can never hold people accountable to task because that task is especially needed, right? Like, hey, um, there’s an outage.

I expect you to close that outage in 24 hours.

Andy: Yeah.

Mon-Chaio: But I do think it leads to a different way to think about accountability and how, especially at higher levels, how accountability ends up driving not so much, uh, task performance. Um, but more cultural improvements and, and ways of team working and team norms.

Andy: Yeah. Yeah, so. And I think that’s the thing, is making that distinction between it, at. At some levels, especially lower down when you’re doing like more line work, accountability very quickly morphs into coaching. And to me, this is one of the reasons why, as a leader or manager of some of these teams, you need to know how to do those things.

Because getting that account will, will turn into coaching, uh, in one way or another. But once you get into that executive suite where you’re all these different disciplines that are so very different from each other, but have to come together, the accountability, if he goes into the coaching, you’re going to be lost, because you don’t know what to say to someone else, unless you’re one of these Renaissance people who does know a bit about everything.

And. There, it’s really even more strongly about that feedback to create that trust so that you get that cycle going. Uh, that you can, you can trust each other and you can commit and you can argue and you can have that conflict and then you can be accountable again. And once you’ve got that, then you’ve got the results coming out.

Mon-Chaio: I think I agree with that. This is, again, I don’t think this is where I thought this conversation was going to go or end up. But I think that’s why they’re fun.

I think we’ve talked about accountability enough to hold ourselves to account. We want to be on time and not continue to just ramble, which, uh, we are very, very good at. This is, uh, maybe we should start a second podcast called the Ramblers. I think we have a lot to say, but for those that are more interested in being focused.

And perhaps one of your problems around focusing is how do we focus on accountability? How do we drive accountability within our organizations? But even at a smaller scale, how do I drive accountability with my peers, with my direct reports within engineering specifically, we hope this is given you a sense of what the research says about it and how we think about it in specific tactics that you can implement, Even if they’re so broad as to just say, make everyone responsible for everything, and you will get fantastic teams.

There’s obviously more nuance behind it. And if you’re interested in that, if you’re interested in our help or our thoughts on your specific situation, please reach out. We love to help folks. That’s what we do. And that’s a big reason why we started this podcast. Reach out to us at hosts at the TTL podcast.

com. That’s hosts with an S at the TTL podcast. com. We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode. Tune in next week when we will be rambling about something else that will be equally as exciting. But until then, be kind and stay curious.