119: Two words that are PREVENTING your team from being accountable

What I see in both situations, business owner and team leader in the corporate world is saying, Hey, I need you to submit this every Friday. I need to know what's going on the team. I need, this helps me do my job well. Now, if I don't love that manager, do I care that they need something to make their job easier?

Maybe not. If I like that manager, but I'm really busy and I'm really spread too thin. Am I going to do that? Because that's the reason? No. I'm not right. I hate to say it, but that's not enough of a reason for me to do this thing that feels like a tax that I don't really see the value in. 

Welcome to the managing mid simple podcast. I'm Lia Garvin, your host and team operations consultant through this show and my signature ops playbook. I condense a decade of experience driving team operations in some of the most influential companies in tech to save you time, money, and stress. It doesn't matter if you're a business owner who realized that running a team isn't as easy as you thought it would be.

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Entrepreneurs and business owners listening right now, we all started with big dreams, right? Freedom, impact, bringing our visions to life. But there's a twist many of us didn't see coming. That managing a team is the hardest thing about running a business. And the words, because I said, so it doesn't work with children or our employees drawing on my team operations experience in big tech and with business owners, I realized we often complicate how work gets done more than we need to.

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Kind of nice, right? So if you are ready to make this whole managing thing easier while scaling your business, head to LiaGarvin. com slash the book or Amazon. com and get your copy of the unstoppable team today.  Welcome back to the show. So I have answered this question twice in the last 24 hours, which means something is in the air.

And when that happens, I pull out my microphone and I record an episode about it because this is something that you are eager to get an answer to. And that question is, how do I get my team members to do something I asked them to do? And the answer to that is removing two words from your vocabulary.

Those words are I and me. Now hear me out. Okay. What I've started to find over the years and Absolutely saw as I was doing team operations and program management back in the corporate world was sometimes an effort to be more conversational and build connection with our teams. We'll say something like, Hey, can you send me that report when it's done?

Or I need this by two o'clock or, and we use this language of I and me. And it might seem pretty harmless at first, but what happens is we are setting up the situation where our team members are doing something or not because it's for me, as opposed to for their job or for the company or for their expectations.

Now think about it, years ago I was running a project with a design team, I was overseeing a design team and I would say to my team members, Hey guys, you know, I need, I need this to get in by two o'clock. Like I need to send this over to engineering by, by Friday at four. Can you send this to me when you're ready?

And some people would do that because they liked me or they're a people pleaser and that worked for them. But other people was like, I don't need to do this because you asked me. And we had this situation where there was this absence of accountability because I was presenting it as, They're finishing this work because it's for me.

I need it. I want it to get done. Now instead, the reality was they were getting that thing done by two o'clock because that was the deadline of the project for them to have done their job successfully, right? And we want to move our teams into doing work because they are accountable to it because it's their job.

It's the expectation of the role and of the company. And how do we do that? Well, we got to get rid of I and me. So I have a friend that is running a business and he was sharing, he's been working to get a team member to fill out a weekly status report. And I've had the same thing come up in big teams in the corporate world of having a lot of resistance to filling out a weekly quick updates.

You know, what I get done, what am I doing next week? And what I see in both situations, business owner and team leader in the corporate world is saying, Hey, I need you to submit this every Friday. I need to know what's going on on the team. I need, this helps me do my job well. Now, if I don't love that manager, do I care that they need something to make their job easier?

Maybe not. If I like that manager, but I'm really busy and I'm really spread too thin, am I going to do that? Because that's the reason? No, I'm not right. I hate to say it, but that's not enough of a reason for me to do this thing that feels like a tax that I don't really see the value in. So again, this is where the I and the me is getting in the way, especially when paired with I need, okay, is they're not going to do it necessarily just because we said so.

So the framing has to become, Hey, this data support, it's a core expectation in your job. And here's why knowing exactly where something's at allows us to be able to plan and forecast for the next week. It allows us to make sure that your work is being recognized in the right way, that you're working on the right projects, that I can find a resourcing for you if there, if you need support.

So we know I can move the ball along on other work in the team and company so that we can be bringing in more business. That's why we need the status report. And so it's got to be done by Friday at five because that allows us to plan for next week. Okay. Nowhere did I say you're doing this because I want it to be done or it's helping me personally become, you know, more effective.

And this is how we move this accountability ball that we've taken by saying, I need this. We're keeping the accountability ball in our court. We're moving it to our team members court and saying, Hey, this is a responsibility of your job. You got to do it by this deadline. This is what we agreed on. Right.

And they're keeping that. And now they can feel more accountable to not only that, when you've set that expectation that this is part of their job. When they don't do it, now you can have a feedback conversation around gaps around their job performance as opposed to gaps around them not doing something that made something helpful to you.

You know what I'm saying? Because doing something that makes your job easier isn't necessarily, probably in most cases, not an expectation of their job. That's not something that they will be getting paid more for, get a better performance review for. Right. This sort of doing this to help me out sort of vein of work is just being a great team player potentially, but that is not enough of an incentive.

We want people to feel personally accountable when they feel personally accountable, when they see actually it's part of my job. And when I do this, it works in my favor because my performance is better. I am paid for that work and that whole line around connecting expectations and performance. So if you are feeling stuck getting folks to listen, you to do something like a status report, get their deadlines done on time, or whatever is kind of coming up for you in that space, take a look at how you are framing the conversation.

And if you're saying I, me, I need, it helps me. And you're framing it in terms of this sort of Personal. This is about you and them. Reframe it. Use a little bit more of that passive language, right? I don't always recommend it and kind of like personal communication, but in this context saying this needs to be done by this time for this reason, and it's the expectation of your job that is going to shift the whole conversation dramatically.

Okay. Give it a try. Let me know how it goes. This is a tough one, but this is something that is going to show your team members what's in it for them. Why it's an expectation, how it's not just something you want because you said so. And that is going to drive such better results and save so much more time, save so much anxiety, save so much sort of resentment between you and your team member.

So you're going to want to do this. Let me know how it goes. See you next time.  That's all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive.

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