Stop holding people accountable, start treating them as adults

When I was a young tech founder I fell into this common trap quite quickly once we started hiring people: Trying to hold people accountable for the (often undefined) expectations I had of them.

I see this as an early and easy management and leadership trap and it comes up regularly with my clients, who are often CEOs and managers. That strangely and pervasively, we carry this idea around with us, that we need to somehow hold people accountable and manage them. And what that means for most people is to look over their shoulders, question them, and get updates on their progress.

This might seem well-intentioned, too often however, there’s an underlying sense of frustration that you can’t trust someone to do whatever it is that they are there to do or have been hired to do or are your business partner to do. And over time, it only instills this same sense of distrust and frustration in the person you’re doing your best to hold accountable.

Agreements versus accountability

My lesson over time, especially now that I work as a coach, mostly with CEOs, has been to say:

“You’re paying me lots of money to coach you. I’m not going to hold you accountable, not even a little bit, around your dreams and your wishes.  Because they are your goals and your dreams and your wishes. And I’m not at all interested in asking “Did you do X” or “Did you do Y?”.”

And I think that’s all something if we were to stop doing it, one of two things will happen to us as leaders and managers, but in all kinds of relationships really:

• The person will step into their power and take charge of their own life and tasks. And realize there’s someone there to support them, but won’t hold their hand in a crutch-like way.
• Or that relationship will deteriorate and you realize that a big reason it works is that you’ve done so much extra motivational labor that’s not yours to do.

The underlying solution to this is to make agreements with people. I’ve learned this from my own coach a while ago who sent me this audio tape to listen to before our first official coaching session.

The general idea of agreements:

At the start of any meaningful relationship that’s developing in your life, you sit down with the other person after the first few interactions. And you talk about your expectations for whatever kind of relationship you have with them, whether it’s business or client or romantic. This puts the ball in your park and most leaders and people I know will immediately face a pretty scary, but soon relieving task at first: To define what it is that you’re hoping to get out of the connection with this person. This will be imperfect and require regular chats as you realize new wishes and get to know the other person better. Sit with the question: What is it that I long for to see from myself and this other person in this relationship? Be as specific as you can be. If you’re unsure what “specific” means in this context, the non-violent communication framework is a great start.

It doesn’t really matter what kind of relationship we’re talking about. As you talk about your expectations and make space for the other person to talk about theirs, you figure out where are you able to meet each other and make agreements together. Agreements that come from everyone’s heart where every party involved is choosing them. Because if people don’t have choice, it’s going to be a nightmare. You’re going to keep running into this “accountability problem”, where you’re on people’s back and asking people to do something, that they have not, from within their own open heart agreed to do.

The next step:

Once you have made agreements, I find that when people from the choice of their own open heart have agreed to do something, they want to live up to that. That’s a part of how we operate as humans. If you’re their manager or coach, you may still check in with them regularly to hold space, ask them how things are going, but purely from a wish to stay in connection. It’s not to check up on whether they are doing their work. You should have worked this out in the agreements part, where how work is done and shown is already defined. This way, instead of actively expressing your distrust through your frustrated check-ins, you will actively build trust and show that you have their best interest at heart and not your own. It may take some time, but eventually, people will bring their challenges as they’re going to work on their dreams and goals and you’ll have a chance to support them and guide them.

If you catch yourself with new expectations, you bring them up to renegotiate your agreements. Outside of that, you can stay completely agenda-free with your future interactions with this person. There’s nothing more connecting than that kind of relationship, I’ve learned!

If people fail to live up to their own agreements:

If at any point you notice an agreement isn’t being lived up to, I think that’s not a problem and a part of what will happen in life regularly. I do think it’s essential to bring it up right away, as simple and as plainly as possible: “We agreed to meet here at 10am and it is now 10.21am, from where I stand it looks as if you didn’t meet our agreement, can you let me know what happened?” This gives you a chance to talk through any misunderstandings of agreements.

I believe the above is different from holding people accountable, which sounds more like “Did you do your 10 push-ups this morning like you said you would?”. In the above case, trust was broken and agreements weren’t lived up to, so now there’s a need to return to a reconnection by getting clear on what happened. It can take considerable amount of emotional strength to be able to go into these kinds of conversation, but it’s even more important to learn how to do so, if you’d like to have healthy, happy and long-term business and romantic relationships of any kind.

Again, most people I know once they’ve made an agreement want to live up to it. In the cases where people or myself fail to do so, I tend to find 3 reasons:

• sometimes life happens, we failed to plan something correctly, other unexpected events come up and we can’t stay true to what we agreed on. Ideally, that is a rare occurrence and when it does come up, we can talk about it, clear the air on frustrations and disappointments and then move on and get back to our usual connected relationship.
• sometimes people still don’t actually want to do what they agreed to do and this shows up through not living up to one’s word. If that is the case, there’s a chance to identify that, improve the agreements and try again.
• more rarely, sometimes people are simply unable to live up to agreements they have made and this happens regularly and as a pattern. Even if they agreed to them from the goodness of their own heart. The root of that can be any number of patterns under the sun, but is usually connected to a lack of self-worth, self-trust or self-reliance. If that is the case, there’s not much to do for you other than to part ways with the other person after you’ve reached your frustration level to a point where it’s gotten too much.

It’s trial and error to figure out as a manager, business partner or romantic partner where your level of frustration and pattern recognition lies, but over time, sooner or later, it becomes clear what kind of relationship you have in front of you.

To summarize:

• Stop holding people accountable
• Treat them as adults
• Make agreements
• Live up to your own agreements
• Let people live up to their own agreements
• If an agreement isn’t lived up to, talk about it.
• If trust gets broken too many times you go your separate ways (learn about your boundaries)
• Heal the wound that’s left in you from the break
• Start again with someone you have a better sense that a healthy, long-term connection, business, romantic, client-wise, can happen