Accountability Without the Resentment

How Accountability Works

Accountability was an elusive leadership challenge for me. I toggled between harping on small problems while treating good performance as “just doing your job” and overindexing on positive reinforcement while ignoring small problems. The first approach undermined excellence, and the second created chronic low performers. I knew what to do: create accountability that continuously improved performance and promoted innovation, but I didn’t know how.

Ted Versus Alice

I love Apple TV’s show, Ted Lasso. Ted is a former American football coach who gets hired to coach a British men’s football team. This season, he’s coaching the Women’s Team. His leadership lessons are typically brilliant.

I think Ted missed a trick in this latest episode (spoiler alert). His assistant coach, Alice Chilton, feels she’s not getting the respect she’s due from the players and begins coming down hard on them. She criticizes even the smallest error sharply and makes the players do excessive laps when they push back.

Ted gives Alice one of his characteristic stories, this one about how he used to come on too strong when barbecuing meat. He learned to poke and prod less, and the meals turned out better. Alice gets it, but doesn’t seem to see herself in the story.

She comes down hard on the team at halftime during the next game. Afterward, Ted suspends Alice for the final game of the season. She’s shocked, angry, and probably a bit confused about what she did wrong.

What Could Ted Do Instead?

I learned after years of trial and error that your most productive accountability mindset is “it’s not me against you, it’s us against the problem.” When a problem occurred, I used to get all worked up and deliver a lecture. It corrected the immediate error, but created resentment and little improvement in overall performance.

Things improved with the new mindset and a simple, three-step process: 1) identify the problem, 2) note the impact, and 3) decide how to do it better next time. For something that involved poor judgment or negligence, I added a fourth step: how will you make it right?

Imagine Ted Lasso taking this approach with Alice.

Step 1. “Alice, I saw you berating the team at halftime, calling their performance shameful. Help me to understand where you are coming from on this.”

Step 2. “What’s the impact of this approach? … I see players demoralized and frustrated, which is damaging their performance. This isn’t like you. What else is going on?”

Step 3. “Let’s talk about better ways to correct player performance …”

Step 4. “Alice, those were damaging words you used. How will you make it right?”

Supportive Accountability

I call this approach Supportive Accountability, part of my 3-Discipline Leadership System®.

The beauty of the system is the how-to approach for the most challenging leadership tasks like accountability. You don’t get a bunch of theory or lectures on what to do; you get simple, repeatable, and teachable processes that create team-powered momentum, so you can go from fighting today’s fires to building tomorrow’s prosperity.

About Author

Chris Kolenda

I work with leaders who want to build unshakeable business endurance.

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