There were more than 100 people in my Directorate, working in offices around country. Many of them were specialists with expertise I didn’t have. We faced a mammoth delivery agenda, serving colleagues across the organisation and thousands of stakeholders outside it. Performance was not the best. We needed to make savings but none of our internal customers wanted to lose ‘their’ service. I was new to the department and new to this level of leadership. Deep breath.
Suddenly, my ideals on delegation, on ‘setting up’ my team to deliver seemed under threat: I didn’t have firm foundations in place in the team or my knowledge; even if I asked the right questions, sometimes I didn’t understand the answers. How was I supposed to keep this all on track, let alone improve it and deliver more for less? And even if I wanted to take over, I couldn’t because I didn’t have the skills.
I recently heard that there’s no word in Spanish for ‘accountability’. You can say ‘responsibility’ but it doesn’t quite have the same implication of having to answer for what you’ve done (or what you haven’t). I wasn’t just responsible for the Directorate’s work. I was accountable for it.
As you climb further up the ladder, your role overseeing multiple, complex pieces of work gets broader just as you get more distant from the day-to-day activity and become less likely to be expert in everything you’re accountable for. Even if you manage to set the team up to deliver, how can you keep track of how things are going? How do you judge where and when to offer support, or to intervene? Good governance is an essential part of the systems and culture you build as a leader. And it’s terribly hard.
I learned some valuable lessons in that role – through my failure as much as my success –and then interviewed lots of new Directors to see what they had learned. Here are some of the things they shared:
😎Beware Optimism Bias: when you ask how things are going, many people are more likely to be positive than not and to want to reassure you that ‘it’s all fine’ and they’ve ‘got it covered’. They’re not necessarily lying. They might just be giving others the benefit of the doubt or making assumptions about what you want, or need, to hear. This tendency will be worse in contexts where historically raising problems has been met with punitive action rather than support. To help manage this, set up systems that use concrete and consistent data as a basis for the judgement and don’t be afraid to probe: “What makes you say that?”; “How would we know if it wasn’t on track?”; “What are you worried about?”; “Is there anything I haven’t asked about that I should know?”
🎉Celebrate Failure: as well as watching your own behaviour when you receive bad news, you can take other steps to create psychological safety for your leaders. Create regular forums for discussing things that went wrong, share your own lapses of judgement and oversights publicly and reward those who speak up about problems or concerns. This can feel risky if the wider organisational context doesn’t support it – I worked in Government, which is not always know for its ability to admit mistakes – so build your credibility first and look at how you can shift the culture among your peers and bosses too.
🤓Get training and support. Being an SRO for major projects is not something you can just waltz into and hope to get right. There’s too much riding on it. Find out what you don’t know and make a learning plan early on to either fill the gaps yourself or to recruit people around you who can. I was never going to become a technical expert on some of the things I was accountable for, but I could build networks that would help me formally – e.g. experts joining my project review meetings – and through mentors who I could turn to for help in moments of doubt (including when I didn’t understand the answers to my own questions).
🏭Get back to the floor. The people closest to the work often see the threats and opportunities most clearly. Get out and about in your teams and build the relationships and opportunities that allow information and ideas to flow. I don’t just mean a ‘meet and greet’ tour at the beginning. I mean sitting alongside people at all levels to understand and appreciate their work, seeing what problems they’re facing (and solving) and spotting for yourself the kinks in the system that no amount of governance is ever going to reveal to you.
👍👎Actually manage performance. I often work with leaders who are frustrated with the performance of their team, but have never really communicated their expectations. We somehow expect them to read our minds and when they fall short of our unspoken ideal we’re indignant – they should have known, I shouldn’t have to tell them. Get back to basics: set expectations, give and receive feedback regularly, provide support and challenge, if things don’t improve, do something and do it fast. And if you do find yourself having to let someone go, stop at nothing to then get the talent you need. No amount of governance process or training will make up for not having a competent team.
Finally, know that even if you do all of this, things will still go wrong because that’s life. The key will be to keep calm and keep perspective. So much of how you’re judged will be in how you respond in that moment rather than what you might have done to avoid it. And it will probably be the best training you ever get.
