What Accountability Actually Means
Accountability is one of those words that gets thrown around in every leadership meeting, every performance review, every company values statement — and almost never means what people think it means.
Most of the time, when a leader says “we need more accountability,” what they actually mean is “someone screwed up and I want to make sure it doesn’t happen again.” That’s not accountability. That’s blame with better branding.
I’ve spent over two decades building and running teams, and I’ve learned that real accountability is one of the hardest things to practice in an organization. Not because people don’t understand the concept, but because it requires something most leaders aren’t willing to give: honest self-examination.
Accountability is not punishment
The first thing to get straight: accountability is not what happens after something goes wrong. That’s consequences. Accountability is a system — a way of operating where everyone, at every level, owns their commitments and is transparent about whether they’re meeting them.
When I took over a support organization that was struggling with chronic missed SLAs, the previous leadership had tried to solve it with accountability — or what they called accountability. They’d implemented a tracking system where every missed SLA triggered an escalation to a manager, who was expected to document why it happened and what corrective action was taken. The paperwork was impeccable. The SLAs were still terrible.
The problem wasn’t that people weren’t being held accountable for missing targets. The problem was that nobody was being held accountable for why the targets were being missed in the first place. The root causes — understaffing on certain shifts, a broken triage process, a knowledge base that hadn’t been updated in a year — were known but unaddressed. Leadership had created accountability for the people closest to the problem while exempting themselves from accountability for the conditions that created it.
That’s backwards. Accountability starts at the top, or it doesn’t start at all.
What it looks like when you actually practice it
When I restructured that organization, I started with myself. In my first all-hands meeting, I shared the punch list — every problem I’d identified in my first 30 days, and what I was going to do about each one. I put timelines on my own commitments. And in every subsequent all-hands, I reviewed that list publicly: what I’d done, what I hadn’t done, and why.
Some items I’d completed. Some were in progress. Some I’d failed on — budget requests that got denied, cross-functional initiatives that stalled because I hadn’t built the right relationships yet. I said that out loud, in front of the whole organization. Not as some performative vulnerability exercise, but because I was asking them to be transparent about their commitments, and I couldn’t ask for something I wasn’t willing to model.
The effect was immediate, and it surprised me. People started owning their misses differently. Instead of defensive explanations, I started hearing honest assessments: “I committed to having this done by Friday and I didn’t. Here’s what happened and here’s my new timeline.” That’s accountability. Not punishment. Not blame. Just honest ownership of what you said you’d do versus what you actually did.
The difficult conversation problem
The place where accountability breaks down most often is in performance management. And I mean that specifically — the act of telling someone that their work isn’t meeting expectations.
I’ve managed hundreds of people across my career, and I can tell you that the vast majority of underperformance festers not because leaders don’t see it, but because they avoid the conversation. They’ll complain about someone’s performance to their peers, to HR, to anyone who’ll listen — everyone except the person who actually needs to hear it.
I’ve been guilty of this myself. Early in my career, I had a team lead who was well-liked, had been with the company for years, and was consistently underdelivering. I knew it. The team knew it. I spent months trying to work around it — reassigning work, compensating with other team members, hoping the problem would resolve itself.
It didn’t resolve itself. It never does.
When I finally had the conversation — directly, respectfully, with specific examples and clear expectations — the team lead was upset. But he also said something I’ll never forget: “Why didn’t you tell me this six months ago?” He was right. By avoiding the hard conversation, I’d done him a disservice. He’d been operating under the assumption that his performance was acceptable because nobody had told him otherwise. That failure of accountability was mine, not his.
The framework I use
After enough of these experiences, I built a simple framework for how accountability operates in my organizations. It has three parts:
Clarity of commitment. Before you can hold anyone accountable, they need to know exactly what they’ve committed to. Not vague goals — specific, measurable commitments with timelines. “Improve customer satisfaction” is not a commitment. “Reduce average response time to under four hours by end of Q2” is a commitment. Most accountability problems are actually clarity problems. People aren’t failing to meet expectations — they’re failing to meet expectations that were never clearly set.
Transparency of progress. Commitments need to be visible, and progress against them needs to be tracked openly. Not as a surveillance mechanism, but as a shared understanding of where things stand. In my organizations, we reviewed key commitments weekly at the leadership level and monthly at the all-hands level. Not to catch people failing — to catch problems early enough to do something about them.
Honest reckoning. When commitments are missed, the response isn’t blame. It’s diagnosis. What happened? Was the commitment realistic? Were the resources adequate? Did something change that made the original plan unworkable? Sometimes the answer is simply “I didn’t execute well enough.” That’s fine. The point is to be honest about it and adjust.
Accountability for leaders is different
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable. The accountability that matters most — leadership accountability — is the kind that gets practiced least. Because the higher you go in an organization, the fewer people are in a position to hold you accountable. And the fewer people who hold you accountable, the easier it is to avoid it.
I’ve reported to executives who demanded accountability from their teams while being completely unaccountable themselves. They’d change priorities mid-quarter without acknowledging the impact. They’d make commitments to their teams and quietly let them expire. They’d blame their direct reports for results that were directly caused by decisions they’d made — or failed to make.
The worst version of this is the leader who uses accountability as a weapon downward but a shield laterally. They’re rigorous about tracking their team’s performance but dodge every peer review, skip every feedback session, and deflect every question about their own missed commitments. If you’ve worked in corporate America, you’ve met this person.
Real accountability means being willing to say, in front of your team: I told you I would get this done, and I didn’t. Here’s why, and here’s what I’m going to do differently. That’s harder than any performance improvement plan you’ll ever write.
Why most organizations get it wrong
Most organizations treat accountability as a mechanism — something you implement with dashboards, KPIs, and review cycles. And those tools have their place. But accountability is fundamentally a culture, not a system. You can have the best tracking tools in the world and still have zero accountability if the culture doesn’t support honesty.
I’ve seen organizations with sophisticated performance management systems where everyone rates themselves as “meeting expectations” because the culture punishes anyone who admits they’re struggling. The system is technically working — every box is checked, every form is filled out — but nobody is actually being held accountable for anything because the incentive structure rewards looking good over being honest.
Building a culture of accountability requires three things that most leaders find uncomfortable:
First, you have to model it. Publicly. Consistently. Not once in a keynote — every week, in the way you talk about your own commitments and shortcomings.
Second, you have to make it safe to miss. If the consequence of admitting a miss is punishment, people will hide their misses. If the consequence is a constructive conversation about what went wrong and how to fix it, people will surface problems early — which is what you actually want.
Third, you have to separate accountability from blame. Blame is about finding fault. Accountability is about finding truth. They feel similar in the moment, but they lead to very different places. Blame creates defensiveness. Accountability creates learning.
The uncomfortable truth
Here’s what I’ve come to believe after twenty-plus years of leading teams: the organizations that talk the most about accountability usually have the least of it. The word becomes a cudgel — something leaders use to pressure the people below them while exempting themselves from the same standard.
Real accountability is quiet. It’s a leader who reviews their own commitments before reviewing their team’s. It’s a culture where “I missed this, and here’s what I’m going to do about it” is a normal sentence, not a career-ending confession. It’s an organization where the feedback flows in every direction — not just downhill.
If you want accountability in your organization, stop demanding it and start demonstrating it. The rest follows.
— Bruno