Accountability is a visible indicator of your leadership style and effectiveness.
What Is Accountability?
There are many definitions of accountability. Here is mine:
‘Accountability is the promise to deliver on your commitments and to be answerable for the results of your actions and decisions’.
Accountability Versus Responsibility
Responsibility is the expectation that you will complete a task or fulfil a role. Accountability goes further: it means owning the results, whether good or bad, and being open about your progress along the way.
Accountability Versus Ownership
Ownership is the intrinsic commitment and initiative you bring to your work. Accountability is answering for the results. Both are essential, but ownership drives leaders to commit fully, while accountability ensures they actually deliver against that commitment.
Leading With Accountability
Accountability starts with you. You must take ownership of your decisions and outcomes without making excuses or blaming others.
You do this by:
• Setting clear goals with specific metrics
• Sharing your commitment to accountability with others
• Embracing humility and admitting mistakes openly
• Seeking feedback or feedforward through coaches or trusted colleagues
• Focusing on outcomes instead of activities
In so doing, it’s equally important not to:
• Blame external factors like the economy or team dynamics
• Rely solely on internal motivation
• Demand perfection from yourself or others
• Ignore uncomfortable feedback
Holding Others Accountable
Many leaders make these two critical, diametrically opposite mistakes:
1. Forcing Accountability on Others
This approach is doomed to failure for the simple reason that accountability cannot be imposed by someone else. It comes from an internal sense of commitment to achieving an external goal.
If people don’t believe in the objective, aren’t persuaded that change is necessary, or don’t see how they can make a real difference, no amount of pressure or coercion will force them to become accountable.
‘Laying it on the line’ or stating that someone is ‘on the hook for this’ creates fear, not accountability.
2. Shielding Others From Accountability
This approach feels kind, understanding, and empathetic, but ultimately is entirely unhelpful. When members of your team have made a public commitment to deliver a result and they begin to struggle, resist the temptation to rush in and rescue.
By all means, offer support when it’s needed, but holding someone to account means they must take ownership of their actions, decisions, and performance, and at times face the consequences of not acting or not delivering.
The middle ground between these two wrong approaches is to set clear expectations focused on achieving required outcomes, rather than simply completing tasks.
Then review progress against objectives regularly through a transparent and supportive process that keeps responsibility with the person who’s accountable for the results.
The 5 Conditions for Accountability
Naturally, accountability starts with you. When team members see you being accountable, they are more likely to follow suit.
However, as a leader, you must be more than a mere role model. You have to create the five conditions for accountability.
These are as follows:
1. Clarity
Help people understand the outcomes they’re accountable for and how they will be measured.
Ensure that you have clearly written job specifications, updated RACI charts, and accurate OKRs.
Set aside time to review progress regularly.
2. Focus
Don’t overload people with too many accountabilities. If your team takes on more than it can handle, there’s a real risk that little will actually get achieved.
As Jim Collins wrote in Good to Great. “If you have more than three priorities, you have none!”
A similar logic applies to accountabilities, albeit that 5 is normally held to be the correct number in frameworks such as the X-matrix.
3. Safety
Taking accountability can feel risky, and people will only do it when they feel psychologically safe.
Stepping up to a challenge or initiating a change is essential for learning and growth.
So, make it safe to struggle. Disconnect discomfort from fear and allow your team to move from the comfort zone to the learning zone.
4. Support
Use appropriate approaches to support your team as they hold themselves and others to account.
Examples might include guidance when getting started with a new challenge, coaching to navigate change, and feedforward to recover from setbacks.
5. Consequences
When we assume accountability, we accept that there will be consequences for the outcomes of the actions we take.
Where interventions are necessary, wherever possible, avoid being punitive; instead, promote learning and agency.
In Summary
Accountability cannot be imposed on people. It must come from within.
As a leader, first hold yourself to account through high standards of conduct, transparent goals, and a commitment to what Kim Scott calls ‘radical candour’.
Then create the five conditions that allow your team members to develop their own internal sense of commitment and the psychological safety to take ownership of their objectives and those of the wider team.
Ultimately, holding others to account the right way positions people to succeed rather than setting them up to fail.
When leaders get this right, they create cultures where people take ownership, make better decisions, and more consistently deliver the results for which they are accountable.
