Diviney, Rich. The Attributes, Ebury Edge 2021, pp. 189-196
Chapter 21
DON’T BE A MEDIATOR
Accountability: Taking responsibility for, and ownership of, your decisions, actions, and the consequences thereof
NAVY SEAL TEAMS, LIKE any military outfit, have both officers and enlisted men, and the best officers—like the best leaders in any organization—typically have a distinct set of attributes. When I was in charge of selection and training, we designed a separate weeklong program specifically to screen officer candidates. There was a myriad of activities, both physical and cognitive, to help us get a better glimpse of the attributes in each man. One of the most important things we were looking for was accountability.
For years, we’d used a mission-planning exercise in officer screening. A candidate would be given the basics of a mission—the type of target, location, available assets—from which he would design a plan that he would brief to a panel. The original purpose was to measure things like knowledge of an environment, the ability to employ assets, and competence in presenting a coherent briefing. Those, as you understand by now, are skills. To explore attributes, though, I added a twist.
When I outlined the mission parameters, I began including two stipulations. One was that the candidate had to include soldiers from the host nation; for instance, Afghans in Afghanistan or Iraqis in Iraq. The other was that the mission had to be executed as a callout, which is exactly what it sounds like: Forces surround a target and use a megaphone to call out the occupants. There are strategic advantages to both of those tactics, especially if a broader objective is to win hearts and minds in a particular theater. Using local soldiers allows them to share ownership of the mission; and a callout is much safer for civilians than kicking in doors and blowing holes in walls. On the other hand, there are also distinct disadvantages to each. No one likes embarking on a high-stakes mission with unfamiliar comrades, and loudly announcing your presence eliminates the element of surprise.
Once I’d delivered those instructions, the officer candidate was sent off to develop a plan with some of my instructor staff, who were acting as members of the officer’s team. This was more realistic than having the candidate pencil up a plan on his own because real-world mission planning always involves the whole team: Reconnaissance guys will map routes, assault teams will plan their portions of the mission, and so forth. I gave each candidate thirty minutes and told him I’d be in my office if he had any questions.
Here was the important part of the twist: I instructed my men playing the role of team members to vehemently protest both stipulations.
After the comic relief of listening to my guys in the next room screaming obscenity-laced complaints, I typically would see the candidates standing in my doorway, sheepishly asking to talk. They would articulate concerns about both constraints. In every case, I would hear them out, then concede on one but hold firm on the other. That is, I might let them off the hook on the callout but insist they use local forces, or vice versa. Then I would send them back to continue planning with a team I knew wouldn’t be satisfied.
This exercise highlighted several attributes, including social intelligence, adaptability, and conscientiousness. But it was particularly effective at revealing accountability or a lack of it. How? By the way each candidate framed his concerns to me and explained my response to the men. In most cases, the candidate would explain to me why he was troubled by the stipulations, and then to the men why he was holding firm on one or the other.
But one candidate was different. He came into my office after the tirade of protests looking a little more rattled than the others. “Hey, sir,” he said. “The guys are really protesting these stipulations.” He went on to give me a few decent reasons, all of which I’d heard before, and, as usual, I relented on one but held firm on the other. When he returned to his team, I could hear him through the wall. “Guys, the boss has decided,” he said. “He’ll concede on using local forces, but he’s putting his foot down on the callout.” The candidate suffered some more scripted grumbling and then went back to planning the mission.
To his credit, his plan wasn’t bad, actually. But there are many times in a combat environment when an officer might be tasked with something that he or his men don’t fully agree with. That officer still has to implement that order, and doing that effectively means taking ownership of the whole process, especially if it’s contentious. That candidate showed me he wasn’t willing to shoulder that kind of responsibility. Implicit in his reasoning to me was, “It’s the guys who are saying this, not me,” and his rationale to his team was, “It’s the boss telling us this, not me.”
That’s what a lack of accountability looks like, and it’s dangerous in any leader. It creates an us-versus-them situation, puts distance between the different levels of a team, and unconsciously (or, in the worst case, consciously) labels higher-level decision-makers as the enemy. Next, and maybe more important, it suggests to those being led that the person in charge might not be willing to be accountable for the big stuff that will inevitably come down the road. Trying to remain neutral, and therefore clean, is incompatible with leadership.
Leadership attributes are not required in all roles. Freelance writers, stand-up comics, or truck drivers don’t necessarily need to lead anyone. They might, however, have people in their lives who look to them as leaders: Every parent, for instance, is in a position of leadership, no matter what they might do to earn a living. Even without that responsibility, though, having a few of these attributes can be handy. Accountability, specifically, helps optimize performance in other areas.
IN COMPLEX ENVIRONMENTS, TAKING action is paramount. Even if that action is making a decision to do nothing, it’s important to understand what you’re doing and why. Just as important is recognizing that any consequences of that action are your responsibility—you have to fully own those decisions.
Being accountable and owning our decisions and actions serves several purposes.
One, it requires that we understand why we’re doing whatever action we’ve chosen, which in turn helps us to be fully committed to it. The officer candidate who effectively processed the profanity-laced complaints of the team members—as opposed to merely hearing them as baseless whining—could understand the logical, legitimate concerns and explain them to me. He could also cogently explain to the men the logical and strategic reasons why I was putting my foot down and allow everyone to come up with a better plan. Purpose provides clarity. It’s nearly impossible to truly own an action if you aren’t clear why you’re taking it. If you fully own your decisions, you will be better able to explain the reasons behind them.
Two, being accountable allows us to look objectively and critically at the results of a decision, which helps us assess the results more accurately and make the next decision more effectively. If the mission plan ends up not working as well as possible, the accountable officer and men will studiously figure out what could have been done better rather than dismissing any flaws as “the boss made us do it that way.” Better decisions will be made next time, and everyone will improve—a far better outcome than repeating a cycle of grudgingly doing what the powers that be demand.
Finally, taking responsibility for a decision and its results immediately engages the learnability attribute (Chapter Eleven). Remember, we human beings are wired to make sense of our environment. While much of that happens automatically and unconsciously, part of that process is very deliberate. At the risk of oversimplifying, this takes place in the form of questions we ask ourselves and which our brains reflexively try to answer.
Try this experiment to see what I mean. Get a blank sheet of paper and set a timer for two minutes. At the top of the paper, write an open-ended question; let’s use “What are some ways I can double my income?” Now start the timer and start scribbling answers. Don’t worry about how practical they are—just jot down as many as you can.
Time’s up. Now you should have a list in front of you, maybe two or three ideas, maybe a dozen. Some of them might be fanciful, like winning the lottery. Some—get a second job, work a lot of overtime—are probably practical. Maybe a few are inane, because robbing a bank and selling a kidney are both terrible ideas. But that’s okay! The specific answers don’t really matter. The point is, you lodged a question in your frontal lobe and immediately began to come up with answers.
We do this to ourselves all the time, only we don’t always pay attention to the quality of the questions. Without even realizing it, all sorts of distracting queries start to pollute our thinking.
Why does stuff like this always happen to me?
Why am I so bad at this?
Why are they always out to get me?
Once asked, our brains can’t help but start trying to answer those questions. Many times, the answers will be no more than random, anxiety-driven guesses, a flailing attempt to make sense of forces and factors we can’t control. When we have a high degree of accountability, however, we shift from unconsciously foundering on the unpredictable external to consciously considering the internal.
What are ways that I can get better results?
How can I improve?
Who are those people who can help me?
We can’t control a complex environment, but we can control how we decide to act and react. Accountability prepares us to ask critically useful questions about performance, as opposed to less useful ones about what unseen or unpredictable forces are to blame. Leaders who are accountable—in their actions, reactions, and thinking—inspire confidence and develop trust among those they lead.
ACCOUNTABILITY CAN BEST BE seen and measured in environments that make being accountable both difficult and consequential.
Let’s go back to those officer candidates. That exercise was useful because it put them in a pressure cooker. They were being told by a senior officer, whom they wanted to impress, to do things in a way that might be risky and that really ticked off the team members, whom they also wanted to impress. Moreover, saddling them with two stipulations was intentionally problematic: In that particular scenario, adhering to both would most likely put the immediate mission and men at risk, while ignoring both would damage the broader strategic objectives. Candidates were trapped between their superiors and their subordinates.
Most of the candidates would deliver my orders to the team members, then hear out their complaints. The style with which those complaints were delivered—with shouting and obscenities—was meant to throw the candidate off-balance, but the substance was legitimate. Accountable candidates listened closely, separated the serious concerns from the grumblings, then delivered a cogent explanation to me. Those candidates did not tell me the men were unhappy—they told me why the mission was unworkable under my stringent conditions.
Every officer, like every employee or teammate, will at times be asked to do something with which he does not fully agree. There also will be times when a directive from above is flawed or just plain wrong. Leadership means knowing the difference, speaking up, and standing firm on what’s right. Speaking truth to power is never easy, but it’s critical in high-performing teams—especially as a leader. In this case, one of those two constraints—the callout or the local forces—had to go. Did any of the candidates fully agree with keeping even one of those conditions? Probably not. But they could understand my reasoning and recognize why my rules were necessary even if not ideal, then embrace my order and present it to the team in a way that inspired confidence. They were, as I put it before, fully owning that decision.
But there was that one candidate who told me the guys were complaining, and who told his men that the boss was holding firm. He didn’t explain what he thought because he wasn’t accountable.
As a senior officer, I saw in that candidate someone who’d too easily placate the whims of those under his command. Also, it was clear that he hadn’t processed the concerns of his men. Instead of analyzing their input, weighing competing factors, and then expressing his own considered perspective, he was merely passing the decision-making from his guys to me, and then from me to the guys. He was being a mediator, not a leader.
As with most attributes, no single test should be the sole judge of someone’s accountability. Even those of us who are pretty high on accountability can think of times when we were less accountable than we wanted to be. This is where environment and intensity matter. Different situations allow us to see accountability in a variety of shades. Accountability might manifest differently in combat drills than it does in the office, out partying in town, or when no one is looking at all. Accordingly, we didn’t definitively peg that officer candidate as having low accountability until we’d put him through a few other accountability-heavy situations that week. We saw similar results in each, which gave us confidence in our assessment—after all, we needed to be accountable for the reasons we weren’t selecting him.