How Do I Hold My People Accountable?

In addition to supporting your people you will also need to set high expectations. You need to do this even in areas where you don’t have domain knowledge. For example, it’s important that your team has solid testable solutions; that is one of your driving goals. You therefore need to get comfortable asking some questions that would tell you that the Team is making progress toward that goal even when you don’t have a solid understanding of the underlying technology or how it’s done. If answers you are hearing do not make sense, then it is on you to drive accountability to an answer that does.

As a leader you do not have to be expert in the areas the Team is working on. But you should know enough to understand when someone 100% sure of what they are doing. You do this by:

Asking specific questions aimed at encouraging data and metrics. For example, “How will you know you are improving …?”

Asking open ended questions aimed at revealing more of the behind the scenes thinking. For example “Could you explain that a little more?” or “Could you draw a picture of this to help me understand the issue?”