Fractional VP Engineering, Leadership & Executive Coach, Mentor, Organizational Developer, Advisor, Speaker, Moderator | Former SaaS founder, CEO
When diagnosing low accountability in your organization, here are 4 signs to look out for: → Visibility of work is low. It’s hard to tell the status and progress of work. Managers spend a lot of time chasing tasks and following up with people and teams. Coordination overhead explodes and people feel micromanaged as a result of this. → Commitments are meaningless. The company regularly throws out its goals, even at the quarterly level. Commitments to technical investments or cleanup after feature releases are overridden because of “other, more urgent priorities”. Follow-up work for incident reviews never gets done because teams are pulled into other tasks. Leaders have a track record of not delivering on their own commitments. This causes teams to feel overwhelmed and frustrations pile up, leading to low morale and decreased commitment. → There’s no consistent feedback flow throughout the organization, from executives, to senior leaders, to individual contributors. Peers don’t give each other critical feedback. There’s a pattern of people inflating the positive impact of others’ work. As a result, performance standards decrease, quality of outcomes decrease, and fewer goals are achieved. → Turnover in the organization is very low. Depending on the company funding, stage, and size, between 4 and 20+% annual turnover can be expected. Mind you, this is only a symptom−I don’t think that you should force high turnover, or that forcing high attrition is a solution. But typically, if employees evolve while the organization stays relatively stable, at least some employees will outgrow it, e.g., because they have developed certain skills or are performing at a level that the company doesn’t need (engineers moving from senior to staff level is a frequent example of this). If many employees stay despite high changes and there are performance issues, it’s usually a sign that there are no clear performance standards, poor feedback, and/or no performance management. By the way, that’s also why I’m always a bit skeptical when managers brag about having very high retention rates on their team: Retention itself isn’t always a positive sign. These aspects work together, so most of the time, when one is present, more of them are. Did you check off one or more of these signs as you were reading and reflecting on your own organization?
Head of People Operations l Executive Leadership Coach l People Lead l People Business Partner l I help lead teams & deliver results
2moThis is very valuable signs , thank you Lena Reinhard . Do you have a good indication what kpis , number or phenomenon should one look for to identify the low visibility ?