Fostering Accountability

The work of software engineers involves making individual contributions toward shared team goals and objectives. In making contributions, they are each given responsibility for some portion of those shared goals. Even so, we may not always be able to count on everyone to display the same level of responsibility and commitment to their work. How can engineering managers encourage their engineers to take an active role in team objectives?

To manage a high-performance software engineering team, you will eventually need to think about accountability. In a workplace setting, accountability is the willingness to take responsibility for one’s actions and their outcomes. Accountable team members take ownership of their work, admit their mistakes, and are willing to hold each other accountable as peers. In performance terms, from Chapter 9, high accountability is a desirable team climate.

In writing and research on managing teams, accountability is often...

Accountability and performance

In your career, you may have had experience with a low-accountability team. Low-accountability teams can be recognized based on their tendency to shift blame, avoid addressing issues within the team, and escalate most problems to their manager. In low-accountability teams, it is difficult to determine the root of problems, failures are met with apathy, and managers have to spend much of their time settling disputes and addressing performance. Members of low-accountability teams believe it is not their role to resolve disputes and instead shift that responsibility up to the manager, waiting for further direction. These teams fall into conflict and avoidance deadlocks, unable to move quickly because they cannot resolve issues within the team.

On the other hand, high-accountability teams are characterized by having members that are willing and able to resolve issues within the team. They take responsibility for their own actions and hold each other accountable...

Building an accountable team culture

When we look deeply at accountability as a trait of teams, we may break it down into two basic components: the acceptance of responsibility for outcomes and the willingness to personally fulfill that responsibility. In other words, accountability concerns the belief that the work is ours and the belief that we have the agency to carry it out. Our goal as engineering managers is to guide our teams to a state where they possess both of these beliefs.

Internalizing ownership and internalizing agency are two very different goals. You can imagine how easy it would be to know that a job is yours while having no idea how to do it. For team members to feel responsible for work but lack the ability or environment to accomplish that work can be incredibly demotivating and damaging. This underscores the importance of supporting both of these aspects of accountability on our teams. To serve these dual aims, use the three Ps of accountability: provide, promote...

Summary

Accountability is the willingness to take responsibility for your actions and their outcomes. In this chapter, you learned how to build accountability into your team expectations and practices.

The main points of this chapter include the following:

• Signs of low-accountability teams are shifting blame, avoiding addressing issues, escalating all issues to the manager, and apathy
• Signs of high-accountability teams are taking responsibility for actions, holding peers accountable, and resolving disputes within the team
• Teams with high peer accountability are able to move much faster since they are able to resolve their own problems as they arise
• The twin goals of an accountable team culture are to instill beliefs that team members possess ownership and agency over their work
• Build an accountable team climate by following the 3 Ps:
  • Provide: Ensure team members have guidance and resources to successfully carry out work
  • Promote: Recognize and reinforce accountable...

Further reading

• The best teams hold themselves accountable, hbr.org, 2014. (https://hbr.org/2014/05/the-best-teams-hold-themselves-accountable)
• Does your team have an accountability problem?, hbr.org, 2020. (https://hbr.org/2020/02/does-your-team-have-an-accountability-problem)
• Accountability in software development, 2021. (https://medium.com/@kentbeck_7670/accountability-in-software-development-375d42932813)