Doing all the work

Photo by Felix Mittermeier.

Ask any graduate of middle school for the two scariest words a teacher can utter. They won't even hesitate. Those words are Group Project. As in, "This will be a group project, your group will be assigned, and the project will account for 70% of your overall grade."

If you, yourself, are a middle school graduate, you can already hear the groans. Followed by the pleading to at the very least let everyone pick their own groups.

The middle school group project is as old as middle school itself. And for every awkward group of awkward 12-year-olds, there is a common pathology. One kid does all the work. The other kids still get the credit. The kid who does all the work resents the other kids but grows up hearing that they have "strong leadership abilities." Whereupon the now adult has a full-time job trying to get people to do things.

The reason middle schools keep dusting off this gem of an exercise is because working as a team is a critical life skill. There's no getting around it. You will need to collaborate in every future professional context, regardless of industry. You will need to know how to lead from influence, not just authority. What better time to learn this than middle school?

Ask a group of middle schoolers for the lesson they took from the group project, though, and you won't get, "work as a team." You won't even get, "how to lead from influence and bring others along on a project." You'll get, "trust no one and do the damn thing yourself."

We have a workforce full of adults who internalized this message during a formative period. Group projects are awful. Your collaborators will let you down. The only accountability you can rely on is to yourself.

A beautiful song and some pointy rocks

It is the siren call of the soon-to-be manager. The appealing notion that once you're in charge, everyone will finally have to do what you say. That reporting lines come with accountability. And that all the things that are hard to get done with influence get easier once there's a Direct Management Relationship in place.

The crash into the rocks is fast on this one. So swift is the recalibration on this front that it's a bit of a running joke for seasoned bosses. Any time one of your direct reports says, "Well, if that person reported to me, they'd have to do what I say." And you just laugh and laugh and laugh.

Accountability is a big, heavy word. It manages to be about management, and feedback, and operational excellence, and culture all at once. We often hear it from founders. Or from HR leaders. But we've started hearing it from an increasing number of middle managers. And while the middle managers are clever enough not to ask if the rest of the org can just report to them. They do say that it's really hard to get anything done right now.

It'd be easy to blame COVID for this one, but they aren't even pointing to the pandemic. Remote work is hard, fine. But the problem they're describing isn't so much distance or time zones or staffing interruptions. It's that their colleagues don't seem to give a shit. Sometimes colleagues on their team, but usually not.

Sometimes the gap is team-to-team. Where the engineering team deprioritizes marketing work. Sometimes it's executives going unresponsive, leaving junior staff completely blocked. What's consistent is that they're working hard and, whether out of apathy or spite, others are making it harder. And just like every bad middle school group project — one person is busting their ass and wondering where the accountability is for everyone else.

Just give me the glue

Accountability questions almost always share two attributes: they're exasperated, and they're phrased in the third person.

Exasperated because it's usually been a problem for a while. The first time someone doesn't do the thing you wish they would have, you make do. You pick up the slack. You paint Jupiter's red spot onto the styrofoam over the weekend. Ideally you give the person some feedback about it, but either way you get on with your day. By the time it's become a Problem I Need Help With, there have usually been several misses. Maybe over the course of a few weeks, sometimes over the course of a few years.

In the third person because they're usually about how to change that other person's behaviour. Or feedback style. Or priorities. Questions generally of the form, "I've compensated for it in the past, but how can I get them to work the way I want them to?"

Many of the obvious answers that people reach for aren't very satisfying in practice. Sometimes those are power games (put me in charge!). They tend to hit a practical limit because unless you end up CEO, there will still be times when your team needs to rely on teams you don't control. Sometimes they are avoidance games (I'll hire my own version of that team!). These avoid the unpleasantness of holding the existing team accountable, sure. But the cost in duplication is massive, and there is a 100% chance that the existing team will hate your new shadow org.

And sometimes people just fall back on "complain and escalate." Which works unless it doesn't. What do you do if their boss agrees with them ignoring your work? And where do you escalate when the person you want to hold accountable is the CEO?

These answers are so tempting because they're simple. And if they work for you, that's wonderful. But they often won't. In any interesting organization, things are usually more complex than that. That complexity needs someone whose whole job is figuring out how to navigate, coordinate, and communicate in order to make sure the right work gets done.

Thank goodness you're here

That person that we pay to work full time on navigating the complexity is you. Yes, you have loyalty to your team. Yes, you have responsibility for your quarterly goals, or your quota, or your SLA. But at the center of it all, your most basic accountability is to help the organization thrive.

And you already know it. Which is why seventh-grade you emerges, time after time, to rescue things. Trust no one, do it all yourself. Second-shifting. Cancelling plans. Your sense of accountability saves the day, albeit at significant personal cost.

The problem is, this isn't seventh grade. The group project doesn't end. Work is a never-ending group project. The lesson that all that seventh-grade suffering was supposed to teach you is that some things are bigger than one person. And that you need to figure out how to work with other people. No one's taking anything away from your heroic solo completion of the asteroid belt at 3am. But as a grown-up, trying to be the lone hero every time will wreck you. For some of you, it already is.

Healing

The scar tissue of failed group projects is distrust. A quickness to flip a switch, decide that other teams can't be counted on, and go antisocial. And like a lot of scars, it might make you look badass but ultimately it restricts your range of motion.

Accountability is way too big to have One Weird Trick that simplifies it all — there are a hundred things at play. But one of the most effective tools, and least-used, is conversation. Not accusation, or escalation. Vulnerable, prosocial, human conversation. About feeling let down. About what you thought was going to happen and what did. About why you care and what you had to do instead. And about your desire to involve them in doing better next time.

Most people show up to work wanting to do a good job. It will be hard for them to hear. But most of the time, if you do it in good faith, they will hear you out. And from that place, you can start to have a creative and resourceful conversation. You can figure out what went wrong, where the breaks in communication or delegation were. You can build systems to prevent them. There isn't one way to do this, there are as many as you can imagine. With a genuine partner, or a team all imagining together, things can get a lot better.

And still, it's not guaranteed. Sometimes you can do everything to reach people and still have them blow you off. Sometimes they'll tell you they don't give a shit. It's rare, but it happens. At least then you'll know. No more frustrated attempts to engineer accountability in an org that isn't interested in it. And then you start interviewing, to see if next time you can pick your own group.

- Melissa and Johnathan