💎 The Corner Office #4 - Trust, Accountability, and Problem Finding

Read time: 6.5 minutes

Hey y’all,

In leadership, trust and accountability are often talked about but not unpacked. This week’s edition of The Corner Office is dedicated to giving you practical inputs that work, whether you’re managing a team or looking to enhance collaboration among your peers.

This week’s Corner Office Insights come from Dev Ittycheria’s (CEO of MongoDB) appearance on The Logan Bartlett Show (episode link).

Insight of the Week  

Dev’s metaphor of the three-legged leadership stool hits home for me. Whether you’re a seasoned CEO or a first-time leader, these are your core responsibilities. Different seasons will require you to focus on a different leg. But like any three legged stool, you need all three. This weekend, I reflected on what leg I might be neglecting and how it’ll impact my team’s performance. Where are you naturally strongest? What leg are you neglecting?

Building trust

I have a longstanding relationship with imposter syndrome. I felt it most when I took leadership of teams where I didn’t feel domain mastery. How do you lead a team effectively without knowing the work down to the last detail? The answer: lead with vulnerability. Admitting ‘I don’t know’ or asking the ‘stupid’ questions creates an environment where it is safe to ask questions, seek clarity, and challenge assumptions. This openness is key to shared learning and debate.

It is difficult for many ‘doers’ to focus on building trust because there is no one thing that you must do. It’s a compounding collection of small, consistent actions. ‘Be vulnerable’ and ‘build trust’ are the so called actions they’re told to take - but what can you actually do?

Well here’s one. Look inwards. How many times in the past week have you sat in a meeting stayed silent when you didn’t understand something? Or Googled it so that you could sound knowledgeable? Or wanted to ask a dumb question but didn’t because you didn’t know how it would be perceived?

For the next month, every time you feel that, ask the question. Speak up.

Transparency is another tool in your arsenal of trust. The dissonance between the feeling of hearing sugar-coated news and the hesitation to share bad news with my team struck me as I thought about this insight. I find that bad news motivates me to find solutions to win, rather than discourage or demotivate me. Why should it be different for my team? There are disasters in all companies, even the best ones.

Have the tough conversation. Present the failures, alongside the successes. Give credit where it is due. Take ownership of the failures and frame challenges as opportunities. Trust your team to take the ‘glass half full’ view and find the fuel to succeed. This approach doesn’t just build trust, it empowers your team to regroup, grow, and achieve together.

Building Accountability

Even the most junior managers can put together a plan to achieve objectives. After all, that’s probably why they were promoted. Accountability is where ideas turn into execution. This is the difficult part of being a manager. You are the one that sets the bar. If you don’t hold people to it, you won’t achieve your objectives, people won’t develop, and worst of all, you won’t be respected.

Ask yourself: How high are you holding the bar? What’s holding you back?

As a manager, I’ve tried many ways to keep my teams accountable over the years. Simplicity is usually a winning choice, so I connected with Dev’s simple recipe for building accountability:

1. Make clear what you want.
   Don’t Say: please keep me updated on what you’re up to.
   Say: I expect you to send me a report every Friday on the week’s activities.

2. Make it clear why it is important.
   Don’t say: Nothing.
   Say: This is important to me because your reports allow me to track progress to the wider team’s goals and understand what’s going on in the business.

3. Give clear feedback.
   Don’t say: Thanks for doing this (even though it was done late or incorrectly).
   Say: I appreciate your sending me this. For future iterations, please send it to me before 5pm on Friday so that I can action it OR please include an itemized list of your activities and their outcomes.

I think I should have this quote framed for all new managers in my team. A culture of inspection does not equal a culture of micromanagement. By incorporating inspection into your operating rhythm, you get a clear picture of the situation and you signal to your team that their work is valued.

Micromanagement: Tell people how to do every step of each task to achieve their objective.
Inspection: Regular check-ins or conversations where you ask questions like: How’s this project going? What’s happening versus the forecast? What's happening with that person? What’s happening with that team?

Searching for bad news

Effective execution means actively searching for problems and addressing them. Create a culture of inspection, and create an environment where there’s no fear in sharing bad news.

So, the missing piece here is ‘don’t shoot the messenger’. This connects both to how you build trust with your team and how you build accountability for outcomes. Search for bad news, and drill down on problems to uncover their real scope, with an outcome driven approach. Don’t play the blame game. If team members hide bad news for fear of blowback, what you’ve got is a ticking time bomb. Keeping a pragmatic approach to bad news doesn’t mean that there aren’t consequences. In the moment, you restrain your anger or frustration by taking a breath, then shift into productive energy mode.

When you have found bad news:

1. Assume it’s worse than it is and uncover the real scope of the problem.

2. Don’t shoot the messenger. Now’s the time for resolution, consequences come later.

Flip the script to manage up. Your operating assumption is now that there is a problem. I don’t know what it is. And when I find it, it’s worse than I think. The same is true for your manager. Make it your mission to have upward clarity about where the problems are and how bad they really are. This creates a level of trust between you and your manager, opening dialog for them to help you.

Tiny thought

“Risk is what’s left over after you think you’ve thought of everything.”
- Carl Richards

Keep your stick on the ice,

Jess

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