Bad Boss Part 7 | Keeping People Accountable

Managers have the hard task of managing and keeping their employees accountable. Matt and the video he reacts to give some steps to ensure employees do their jobs correctly, but you’re doing it respectfully.

There are tons of people out on social media giving business advice. Some of it is good advice, but most of it isn’t good. In this series watch CapForge’s owner react to different advice videos. He’s an expert in all things business and has 20+ years of experience under his belt. Some of the things he reacts to might even surprise you!

Video Transcript: 

Business Advice Video: 

Person 1: Now, I wanna hear your three steps for holding people accountable.

Person 2: Yeah, so the first step is you gotta be very clear what you want. “I expect you to send me a report every Friday.” And the first Friday you don’t send it to me, I see you on Monday I say “Hey Logan, where’s that report?” “Oh yeah, I forgot about it.” I go to you and say “Logan listen, I may not be clear why that’s important to me. But I use those reports to really understand what’s going on in the business. You and your team play really critical role.” What I’m really doing is I’m making the prompt that was my fault not making clear to you what the importance was for why I’m asking you to do this. And I said “Now are you clear Logan? Does everything make sense?” And you go “Yes, I got it.” Now the next time you forget to send me that report, now I can hold you accountable. So you can’t hold someone accountable if you don’t do steps 1 and steps 2.

Matt’s Review:

Okay, so I would say good points here. The hardest part of running a business of any size I think is managing the people. The rest of it you can control and sort of bend to your will and make it work the way you wanna work. But people are all independent individuals with their own agency, 

and their own ideas, and their own way of doing things, and their own way of hearing what you’ve told them. And managing them effectively and managing to the individual’s preferences and style of communication and motivation is all super challenging. So his point here about how to hold people accountable are valid. One, in order to hold somebody accountable, first you have to be super clear about what you want. If you say something really vague like “Hey go do a good job”, they’re free to interpret that any way they want. And you can’t really get mad if the way they do a good job is totally different than what you were hoping for if you didn’t give them any explicit instruction. And then if there are corrections, you owe it to them first to let them know “Hey, when I asked you to do this what I really wanted was this, this, and this. I want it you know exactly this way I want it formatted this way, or whatever”. The more specific correction you can give, the more chance they’re gonna be able to do it the way you’re looking for. If you don’t give any feedback then again that’s really on your plate as a manager. That’s your fault for not giving specific feedback if you made your expectations clear. And then you’ve given specific feedback on where things aren’t still meeting standards, then at that point, yes, you can say “Hey you know why is this still not happening the way I was expecting?” But a lot of people jump right to yelling at employees and saying “you screwed this up! you did this wrong! you didn’t you know do what I wanted!” without ever setting clear expectations or ever giving any feedback or course correction as they’re going along. And then people get resentful and it’s not fair and they’re upset and tend to go look for another job if the you know that happens too many times with the managers they have. So if you wanna prevent turnover and get much better results, you gotta follow the steps. You gotta be clear with what you want, you gotta give good feedback, and then after you’ve done those things then you have a right to expect the results that you were hoping for.