Manager Accountability

Whether you have experienced managers or first-timers reporting to you, there is one universal goal for these relationships: they should make your life easier. Your managers should allow you to spend more time on the bigger picture, and less time on the details of any one team. This is why they’re around. They’re more than just people who take some 1-1 meetings off your hands; they are responsible for taking a team of people and helping that team succeed. When they repeatedly fail to do this, they’re failing to do their job.

Well, that sounds good, except for one little thing: sometimes managers make your life easier by hiding problems and telling you what you want to hear, until months later you see things falling apart and wonder where you went wrong. So you can’t just expect that they’ll magically make things better — you have to hold them accountable. This small piece of expertise — learning how to hold managers accountable — will be one of your biggest learning opportunities as you work at this level.

It’s hard to hold your managers accountable because accountability on complex teams is often muddled. Your managers may oversee teams with tech leads who are responsible for technical direction and quality. They may also work with product or business managers who set the feature roadmap. And of course it’s rare that a team is truly an island, so other teams will have an impact on that organization as well. With all of this responsibility split into different roles, when can you hold a manager accountable?

Here are some tricky but common scenarios I’ve experienced:

The team doesn’t feel very productive, the systems are unstable, and there is some attrition happening, but the product organization keeps changing the goals for the team and everything is always an urgent mandate. Is the manager accountable?

The tech lead has been down a rabbit hole trying to redesign one of the core systems. The design doc is still barely started, and work is piling up, but the tech lead insists that this is a big problem that can’t be rushed. Is the manager accountable?

The manager inherited a team with a bunch of legacy systems that are constantly broken, and the team seems to spend all their time fighting fires. They also support other teams who are using those systems, and the other teams are constantly asking for help and distracting the team with requests. There’s a roadmap to move out of these systems, but you haven’t heard any reports on the progress against this roadmap, and you know the team is killing themselves to keep things stable and manage the support requests. Is the manager accountable?

The answer to all of these questions is yes. Yes, despite the mitigating circumstances in each case, the manager ultimately needs to take responsibility for pulling the team out of these situations and getting them moving forward, because the manager is accountable for the health and productivity of the team.

When the product organization is constantly changing goals, the manager should identify that the changes are causing problems on the team, and work with product to explain the problem and refocus on what’s important. If that fails, she should come to you to help resolve the issue.

When the tech lead is down a rabbit hole, the manager has to bring that person out and work with him to figure out how to make the design process more transparent, bringing in other senior people from other teams if necessary as mentors or collaborators to help him deconstruct the problem and make forward progress.

The manager is responsible for coming to you when the roadmap is stalled because of other issues. If the team can’t do anything but fight fires, the manager should put together a plan for tackling the causes of the fires, and if necessary bring requests for hiring more people or adding more people to the team so that they can get the situation under control. When the team is dealing with too much inbound support, the manager is responsible for triaging that support burden and figuring out whether to refuse some of the requests or, again, whether the team needs more people to manage the workload.

In many of these cases, you’ll need to help your managers. Sometimes they don’t have the clout to push back against product and need your support. They may need your help finding other senior people to partner with their tech lead. You’ll probably have to approve any requests for more people to fight fires, or support them in shifting the support burden to other teams. They’ve done the hard work of identifying the problems that are slowing down their teams, but you need to then help find the solutions or support the path forward. This is what making your job easier looks like — not hiding information, but bringing you clear problems before they turn into raging fires.

Managers need coaching and guidance in the same way that individual contributors need coaching and guidance. Don’t forget to spend time with your managers, get to know them as people, and pay attention to their strengths and areas for development. There’s plenty to talk about in your 1-1s related to schedule and planning, but make time for feedback and coaching. These individuals will have the biggest impact on your overall organization’s success or failure, and in turn will make you look good or bad depending on how well they perform, so take an active role in their management performance.