How to grow accountability?

When we see a team performing badly on a regular basis and it seems they don’t feel responsible for not meeting their objectives — they accept it —, what should we do?

Background

A team is underperforming. From sprint to sprint, they keep making excuses at sprint reviews for not meeting their sprint goal. Although they have retrospectives at each sprint, nothing seems to change. It looks like no one feels accountable for not meeting the sprint goal.

The carrot and the stick

Observing the team during a few rituals as a coach, I was able to narrow the problem to the lack of discipline. For instance, when asked about his decision to change the plan once the sprint had started (without a compelling reason), the Product Owner once answered: « yes we changed our mind; but we are Agile, aren’t we? ».

Shall the team tolerate this? As a coach, shall I tolerate this? These teammates were like unruly children.

It reminded me an excerpt from a book I was reading:

[...] when it comes to standards, as a leader, it’s not what you preach, it’s what you tolerate. When setting expectations, no matter what has been said or written, if substandard performance is accepted and no one is held accountable—if there are no consequences—that poor performance becomes the new standard.

Jocko Willink, Leif Babin. Extreme Ownership. St. Martin's Publishing Group. 2017.

Moreover, to avoid such misbehaviors, what should be the right attitude? I was like a father with his children, thinking about the best education strategy — the carrot and the stick common alternative was coming to my mind. What’s best? And then, the next question was: is the strategy I use with my children appropriate for teams of adult people?

A few days ago, I was having a discussion with my daughters about their teachers. They often talk about teachers that are not being respected by their students. So I asked them: « to gain respect, what strategy do you consider works best? »

In essence, they replied: some teachers have some natural authority, while others yell at students to bring order; everyone has his own method. But reliability is paramount: if you say something, then you have to act accordingly otherwise you loose credibility. And there could be no respect without credibility.

What I learned from this discussion is that the strategy (whether to use the carrot or the stick) is not relevant to the debate on getting the expected behavior. Only congruency between what we say and what we do is important. This is often called role modeling.

How shall we proceed?

Talking with Neno recently, and then trying to clean up my notes and making sense out of them, I came up with the following method.

1. Get to know their understanding of accountability and how they feel after failing a sprint. Because teammates probably have different opinions about accountability, ownership, interdependence (relationship), etc. To do so, as a coach, you need to talk to them individually (because communication styles matter).
2. Find something they believe in. Accountability is not something you desire, it is something you bear — this is more a burden. It sounds like a punishment. So we need to find something more positive. The willingness to help each other or the togetherness, for instance. See this post for further information on the positive aspects of accountability.
3. Make the team agree on something specific in accordance with their belief. It has to be something they will deliver collectively during the next iteration.
4. Enforce discipline in a very strict way, spotting each time they would infringe their agreement. If they act like kids, talk to them as a kid (but not as an adult, or a parent).
5. Celebrate their accomplishment at the end of the iteration.