Consequences For Not Being Accountable

In my keynote on fostering accountability, I argue that if you’re unwilling to impose consequences, you’re not serious about accountability. The audience usually nods, some enthusiastically, some grudgingly. However, when I ask for examples of how they respond to poor performance, few can describe any consequences for not being accountable.

A consequence is an action that closes the feedback loop. It’s the “then” in the “If, then” statement. A consequence is necessary to make the implications of a person’s choices salient enough that they’ll remember and do something differently next time.

Consequences are vital…and rare.

What Managers Do Instead of Having Consequences

When I dive in and speak with managers about how they respond when someone doesn’t deliver as expected, they tell me that they:

Ignore

By far, the most common response to a scenario in which someone drops the ball is to do nothing. They were supposed to send the report draft by 5 pm on Thursday, and there’s no sign of it, “Hmmm… I wonder where it is?” Usually, this is because the manager is so busy or “has bigger fish to fry” that the person’s transgression doesn’t register sufficiently to trigger a consequence.

Nag

A close second to doing nothing is starting to nag, often by email. “I was expecting the draft report last night.” O: “Per our agreement on Monday, you were supposed to have the report sent to me on Thursday.” The nagging might escalate in intensity the longer the delay, but there’s no consequence other than putting up with your annoyance. This is often the modus operandi of a manager who lacks the skills or gumption to devise an appropriate consequence.

Cave

Maybe managers tell me that their default response is to lower the bar. In the case of a report due on Thursday, they extend the deadline until after the weekend. This is often the result of an overly empathetic manager who wants to be liked more than they want to be respected. This is particularly common if the manager knows the original deadline was unreasonable and they failed to set reasonable expectations in the first place.

Rescue

Another widespread response to an employee not delivering is for the manager to jump in and rescue them. This might mean getting a deliverable over the line by the deadline, rewriting something of insufficient quality, or jumping in front of uncomfortable questions the person is getting due to their poor performance.

Managers rescue their employees for several reasons. The first is similar to the reasons for caving—if the manager feels that they didn’t set the person up for success, they might try to make up for it by rescuing them. Another reason is that they are unwilling to risk others’ perceptions of their accountability, so they are reluctant to let a ball drop.

Retaliate

One final behavior that’s less common, or at least less visible, is the manager who retaliates against an employee who fails to deliver. When I say “retaliates,” I mean that somewhere, sometime later, they impose a negative consequence on the person without linking it to the person’s performance of the task. This might mean giving them a crappy assignment, penalizing them on performance reviews, or speaking ill of them to others in the organization.

A manager who retaliates is afraid to have a difficult conversation directly and instead uses the passive-aggressive approach as an outlet for their hidden grudge or grievance.

There are many examples of what happens when employees fail to deliver, but most erode accountability rather than enhance it.

Principles for Effective Consequences

There are a few characteristics of effective consequences. If you keep these in mind, you can tap into myriad options that suit the situation. Good consequences are:

Timely

The human brain makes connections between things that happen concurrently. (It’s why we’re likely to develop superstitions even when two things coincidentally occur together.) That means you want the consequence to happen soon after the action. A timely consequence is getting feedback on a poor-quality draft the next day. A lagging consequence is hearing what was wrong with the draft a week after submitting it to the committee.

Natural

Good consequences flow naturally from the behavior and the choices the person made rather than being contrived or concocted as a way of punishing them. Some natural consequences don’t require you to do anything at all because they will happen all on their own. A natural consequence of writing a poor-quality draft is enduring a barrage of difficult questions from your teammates. A contrived consequence is forcing the person to take on additional work.

Situational

Consequences are supposed to help a person make better choices in the future. Unfortunately, many managers use consequences to denigrate the person or question their suitability for the job. When your consequences focus on the person’s character instead of their choices, you can erode their self-esteem and even create a self-fulfilling prophecy. An example of a situational consequence would be if you said, “I need you to have a proofreader review your reports from now on because you handed in a draft with three factual errors.” A trait-based version of the same thing would be, “I need you to have a proofreader review your reports from now on because you are sloppy and not detail-oriented.”

An Exercise to Improve the Consequences of Not Being Accountable

Now that you know the importance of having consequences, what shoddy non-consequences look like, and the characteristics of good consequences, it’s time to put the ideas to work.

Think of a behavior that demonstrates to you that your employee is not being accountable. Now consider your options for having a consequence for not delivering. Let’s work through the bad options first.

What would be a consequence that would erode accountability and make it less likely the person would improve their performance in the future? (Really, write one down. It will help.)What would be a consequence that would transfer accountability to you?What consequence would reduce psychological safety or make the person feel less confident about performing effectively next time?

Now that you’re clear on which consequences not to choose, think of a better option.

What could you use as a consequence that would foster accountability without eroding empathy? What would be a timely, natural, and situational option?

Sometimes, the best consequence is a good piece of feedback. All you need to do is make it clear you noticed and be candid about the impact of not delivering. If that doesn’t work, you can escalate to more active consequences like adding milestone progress updates or sending them for additional training. Only after you’ve exhausted those types of consequences will you need to move to more uncomfortable consequences like changing their assignments, providing a poor rating, or using a performance improvement plan.

The key is that there should be a “so what” and a “now what” when someone lets you down. Accountability is unlikely if your team doesn’t experience consequences for not delivering.

Additional Resources

Do You Enforce Consequences for Non-performance?

How to Deal with Someone Who is Not Self-aware

Pass the Accountability

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