Challenge and Accountability build Integrity
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Last week, I wrote about how the combination of belonging and challenge create intensity – a laser focus on pushing yourself to bring your best, in service of bringing to life what your team stands for. This week, it’s about what happens when you combine challenge and accountability. In this place, people find out whether all the aspirational hopes and dreams talk is for real. In this place, we find out whether we are really up for the stretch we’ve set ourselves. In this space, integrity is found – it tells you the game is real, and the game is on.
If you’ve been in a team where there’s been a strong sense of belonging and you’ve been challenged in the work you do, you’ve probably felt well developed and a had real experience of growth. If, however, the accountability for results is missing, at some point you start to ask yourself what the point of doing this work is. Why am I stretching when we don’t measure the daring things we’ve set ourselves? Why am I getting uncomfortable if we’re all happy to keep things status quo and not address why we aren’t achieving the results we committed to?
When we add accountability to challenge, we create integrity. If challenge is stretching ourselves, daring to try new approaches, being willing to endure a grazed knee or two along the way, and turning good into great, accountability is about measuring our efforts, getting and giving candid feedback, being transparent about our progress and dealing with the uncomfortable, tricky, conflict-tangled issues. Accountability is where the steel of your team gets tempered.
Pixar are famous for combining challenge and accountability. I think the productions that come out of Pixar are a great example of people stretching and doing their best work. To get to that best work, Pixar use their regular Braintrust meetings. In those meetings, progress is transparent, feedback is a two-way conversation, and the difficult conversations happen about what works and doesn’t work in the story being created. It can be ego-bruising, but it also means getting real about progress and results. They don’t just make a promise of creating “great films with great people” as some pithy slogan on the wall; if you are part of Pixar, you are challenged to be great at what you do, then held accountable to deliver that greatness in your contribution to creating a great film. That creates integrity – it’s tough work, you’ll feel the heat, and what got promised got delivered. In your environment, it benefits your team and organisation because your team delivers results. And it benefits your people because they know they are growing and getting to deliver their best work.
I’ve talked about challenge being goals, growth and grazing your knees. Accountability is:
Figures: measure progress with real data
Feedback: seek and give feedback on progress against the commitments you’ve made as a team
Fearlessness: make it safe for people to be fearlessly open. To say they aren’t making the progress or getting the results they hoped for. Because when it’s safe to say that, you open up the space to work with people on what’s getting in the way.
How do you test for integrity with your team? The first part is to check that you’ve truly got work happening that challenges your people. These questions from last week can help with that. Then it’s about how well you are holding yourselves to account. Four questions I think help with that are:
How are we measuring the impact of the work we do?
How actively do we seek out feedback about our impact?
How transparent are we with each other about the progress we’re making and the results we’re achieving?
How are we doing at raising the uncomfortable challenges that might be holding us back from reaching our potential as a team?
I think these are all tough questions. Accountability is hard because it means being open and vulnerable, especially when things aren’t going as smoothly as you’d like. So if you’re going to ask these questions with your team, tread in gently, be supportive and do everything you can to make it an environment where people can be fearlessly open.