The strongest leaders aren't afraid to recognise failure. Some are even demonised for shutting down parts of a business that aren't working but this is no different to removing a lazy member from the group project. All teams need mechanisms to ensure accountability. Accountability maintains high performance. It's easier to remember the Russian proverb:

доверяй, но проверяй

"Trust, but verify"

Having a slacker in a school group project can become the cause of frustration. Even high performers can be brought down if they see what the shirker can get away with. While we are in school a project might last 1-3 months and you can choose to avoid teaming up again. In business you might be stuck with this person indefinitely.

The sooner problems are addressed the quicker things can turn around. All teams need mechanisms for accountability, these can be daily stand ups or bi-weekly sprint goals. Even teams that you assume are high trust environments have mechanisms for commitment; such as equity tied to targets and vesting periods among co-founders and early employees. Otherwise we risk awarding someone else for the work we put in.

Smaller companies can be better at identifying when things are not working since a single person in a team of 20 accounts for 5% of the business. In larger enterprises people may hide among the numbers if there's no culture of accountability.

Why do we find it hard to call out under performance or feel bad when we have to kill a project?

A conversation on accountability is much harder to have if the project has been going on for some time. The best way to avoid the hard conversation is to set expectations upfront. If you've missed this chance then now is better than later as delay could cause more damage if these crucial conversations are forgone and an opportunity to deal with it is lost.

Shirkers shouldn't get a free ride while a group toils. They can skew stakeholder expectations and start affecting your own performance negatively. It takes a bit of bravery to hold other to account but in a team the burden must be shared.

It is easy for high performers to get fed up if they are not being recognised when they're holding up a team on their own and you could be left holding all the shirkers.

If you really want your readers to get invested in the story, kill off a character, this is a good way to indicate that the stakes are real. Do you think Game of Thrones would have been a hit if everyone survived? How come we aren't resurrecting Boromir or Háma?

Investors

One of the oldest and most studied behavioural patterns among investors is called the disposition effect, built on prospect theory in behavioural economics.

This effect explains that investors are often quick to sell their winners and hold their losers for too long. Studies have found that people are loss averse, they have a stronger negative reaction to the same situation when it is framed as a loss than if it were framed as a gain. These behavioural biases lead us to sub-optimal decision making. Investors will frame holding a losing asset as only a loss upon selling, while holding may lead to the hope that they might one day break even.¹

Cut the losers, hold the winners.

Pragmatism

Not all work needs to be delivered, but evidence of progress needs to be made. If someone has sunk a month of their time and has nothing to show for it this is the slow approach to failure, at the end of a month you need to show a document that outlines the challenges and difficulties and the approaches you took to make progress as well as some potential avenues which may lead to successful outcomes, at the very least.

Essentially you need to go from 0 to 1 in delivery or evident as best as you can to show that you're moving off the starting point. The following month you can't be starting from 0 otherwise you may as well just have been on holiday.

This is the R in R&D.

Excuses

Avoid leaders that blame market forces. A leader that is quick to point at external factors for failure will be as quick to claim the success of others.

When we succeeded it was all part of my plan and when we failed we were just unlucky. It never seems to be the case that we were lucky to succeed, despite our fuck-ups. If we want to use market forces as an excuse then we should accept that we may succeed despite how poor our decisions were in hindsight.

If we fail to be accountable we will fail to recognise when we are in control and when we are not. When shit hits the fan you want to be surrounded by people that know the levers that can help us get out of a mess, not around those that shrug and say "well what could we have done?".

Taking accountability and owning the failure actually helps you avoid falling for the same traps and making the same mistakes. Leaders that show vulnerability are more likely to build trust and stronger collaboration.

Find people that own up to their mistakes, take accountability and make an effort to grow, but make sure to verify.

References

• Scott Galloway