Accountability as Care: A Reflection
This article was originally published in the Fall 2018 SEAHO Report
I’ve had a tough year when it comes to supervision. I inherited a staff that had mixed feelings about me. Several of the RAs were deeply upset about a previous supervisor and that creeped its way into our dynamic. There was a lot of trust to build up and a lot of unmet expectations to tear down. The hardest place to do this was with accountability. As is to be expected, not everyone was completing their job responsibilities and mistakes were made. When addressed, they didn’t trust that I was being fair when I addressed failures in their work. I didn’t trust that they wouldn’t overreact, deflect, or become resentful when presented with critical feedback, so I often avoided addressing issues. Everyone had an attitude that was cynical and it was based out of fear and resentment from previous experience. This has made me think a lot this year about how accountability shows up in our work, both with student staff and residents.
I’ve never been one to shy away from a difficult conversation if I thought it was important. It’s a professional skill that I pride myself on. I make sure my students know at the beginning of each year that I have high expectations, and I will also do everything in my power to help you meet them. But if they aren’t met, or responsibilities aren’t completed, we are going to talk about it. We are going to triage what went wrong, and then we will discuss steps for moving forward. Then it’s done. There are no hard feelings, no bitterness, no extra checking- just do better next time. Even with this warning, everyone reacts differently to these conversations. Some own up to their mistakes right away. They come to me with proposed solutions and are ready to get back into work and move on. Others are anxious about having failed and are more concerned about how I feel about them personally than about the work. Then there are those that get defensive, that make excuses and apologies, but never get to the part about owning the mistake and doing it better the next time. They lay blame on me or their peers or pass the buck to avoid the feeling of failure.
After several semesters of encountering these behaviors in student leaders, I found that I had the same frustrations with the anxious and defensive students. Didn’t they understand that the reason why I hold them accountable is because I care so much about their success? Don’t they know that the conversation is often uncomfortable for me as well? Don’t they know I also feel like a failure when they don’t succeed? Clearly I wasn’t communicating these feelings well to my students. I want so deeply for them to succeed. I take my supervision responsibilities seriously. It’s my job to make them the best, most self-aware, competent professionals I can so they can enter into their careers with confidence. If I didn’t care about them at all, I would continue letting them do it wrong.
But then the question is, how do I demonstrate to my students that accountability and care are one in the same? How can we as professionals really integrate this into our practice? How can we stop being afraid of students not liking us, of their negative reactions? How can we convince ourselves and others in our field that having awkward conversations about poor job performance isn’t mean or negative, but instead demonstrates to these students that I care deeply about their student leadership experience?
Holding them accountable doesn’t make me a mean boss and letting students continue to do things wrong in their job doesn’t make me a caring and empathetic supervisor. Addressing issues directly means that I care enough about them to make myself uncomfortable, in the hope that they will learn something from the conversation and consequences. Kim Scott, author of Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity, discusses this on episode four of the podcast she co-hosts, Radical Candor. She says, “Criticism is necessary! People cannot grow if they don’t know what they’re doing wrong… it’s an act of kindness to tell them how to do better.” As educators, it is doubly our responsibility to hold our students accountable. We owe them that as students and employees. If they don’t learn accountability here, where will they learn it?
Barriers to Accountability
Accountability conversations can be challenging. They can be uncomfortable. And even as trained professionals, we avoid them. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like it’s worth the energy and emotion. Others, it truly doesn’t feel like a big deal, so you can let it slide. There is always nuance to every situation, an explanation for why something didn’t get done. But if we are upholding our departmental missions and personal values, we know that accountability needs to be a part of our daily supervision. It’s an ongoing examination of job performance for improvement and praise. Any change in workplace accountability starts with us as supervisors of staff. If we truly do care for the people we supervise, we must hold them accountable. Not holding them accountable- or worse, covering for their mistakes and doing the work ourselves- doesn’t teach them anything. It creates more work for us.
One of the primary barriers to having tough conversations about accountability is the high probability that a student becomes emotional. A crying student in your office isn’t the most uncommon thing in Housing, but when the crying is related to critical feedback, it can be harder to manage. It’s uncomfortable to be the cause of someone’s difficult emotional situation. Russ Laraway, a co-host of the Radical Candor podcast, is clear about how to handle emotional conversations: “They might get upset, and that’s okay. You cannot control people’s feelings but you can react to them with compassion… don’t be afraid of tears, be ready for them.” We can be compassionate, caring, and understanding when holding people accountable. It doesn’t mean that the accountability measures are no longer necessary. It means we use our professional skills to guide students through the accountability process and allow them to make meaning of it.
Accountability in Practice
The accountability process starts at the beginning of every year when I explain my expectations to my new RA staff. We discuss what it means to take ownership of your work and of your community. I tell them that I expect them to be the expert on their community and that I trust them completely to establish themselves as such. Building trust is essential to being able to hold someone accountable. The student has to trust that you care about them, that you have their best interest at heart, that you know enough about them to understand their perspective. That trust can take time to build, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t start accountability until everyone trusts each other completely. I believe you have to give trust in order to earn it. Giving them complete ownership and responsibility of their community is one way I build trust with my staff members.
Inevitably, something isn’t completed. Someone misses a deadline, or lets their peers down by not completing their part of a staff program, or an incident report is written incorrectly. The issue has to be addressed. Every time, every staff member. This level of consistency is difficult to manage and can get lost with competing priorities. I’m certainly not doing it perfectly. But the more consistent accountability is, the easier it becomes to have the conversation. Both you and your students have more practice with the accountability process. When this has gone really well for me, the students have directly addressed their peers about the mistake before it even gets to me.
When we are inconsistent, people notice. They know that their peer got away with not completing a task on time or showing up to duty late or not pulling their weight on a staff project. With each inconsistency, it becomes harder to uphold standards. It makes our students trust you and each other less. They lose their care for the work, because if no one else is bothering to put up their bulletin board on time, why should they?
Having the Conversation
Russ and Kim shared the worst thing you can say at the beginning of an accountability conversation- “Don’t take this personally.” We all take our work personally, including our student staff. And that’s okay! You can separate problematic behavior from the character of a person. Start each conversation about a failure discussing why the task/responsibility/assignment is important to you, to the community, or to the department. Explain that you care about the student and those who were impacted by their failure to complete the task. Listen openly to what the student has to say, but make sure you distinguish between an excuse and an explanation. An excuse is to get you out of consequences; an explanation provides context that you didn’t previously have. Having an excuse or explanation does not absolve someone of consequences, but it does help inform the conversation and what kinds of consequences are needed. Be ready to explain clearly and directly what the impact of their failure is. Ask them about how they want to make it up to impacted parties. Then, help them implement those solutions. Follow up with written documentation of the conversation and steps, so there is no grey area. Once the solutions have been implemented, you don’t have to revisit the issue. When you move on from an issue, they can move on as well.
Confronting a performance issue directly doesn’t have to be a long, formal meeting. It doesn’t have to wait for a one-on-one later in the week. In fact, Russ and Kim suggest that the best way to do have these conversations is as soon as you can after you notice something that needs to be corrected. Be firm in your correction, and say exactly as much as you need to so the student understands the issue. You don’t always need a solution to fix said issue; work collaboratively with the student to create a solution that works for everyone.
A word on procrastination: don’t. Sometimes we have to wait a few days to get critical feedback to someone based on how life works out, but the less time you delay, the better. This allows for the occurrence to be easily remembered and for people to not repeat the mistake.
Making accountability part of your daily and weekly meetings is a great way to integrate it into the student leadership experience. Seek feedback regularly in large group meetings and from individuals. Provide ongoing feedback, small suggestions or praise, as often as possible. The ongoing nature of feedback serves multiple purposes- it allows students to get more comfortable receiving feedback, allows you to address small issues before they become bigger issues, and gives your students more opportunities to provide feedback to you. Only when we create a culture that is open to critical feedback and takes accountability seriously can we truly say we are successfully developing new professionals.
