Since the pandemic upended traditional working arrangements and the great resignation showed people were willing to vote with their feet, many leaders have found themselves caught in a difficult balancing act. How do we honour flexibility while driving performance? When does compassion cross into complacency?
With productivity plateauing, even declining, amidst a tumultuous business environment that demands more, not less, we need to change our trajectory. We need a reset. But does tipping the balance back toward high performance and greater accountability inherently mean making the workplace less empathetic or even more toxic?
Not if you do it right. Not if you understand how accountability works.
What is Accountability?
Accountability is the internal sense of responsibility or obligation to achieve an outcome. Traditional versions of accountability, where managers “hold people accountable,” decide who is “on the hook,” or single out the “one throat to choke,” represent a punitive approach that isn’t about accountability at all — it’s about fear. This approach misses the fundamental point that accountability lies within the employee. You can no more force someone to be accountable than to be engaged, trusting, or happy.
Attempts to use consequences (i.e., punishments) to coerce people to feel accountable create anxiety, stress, and learned helplessness. Not good for business or people.
But that’s not the only mistake managers make. If you feel your own sense of obligation too profoundly, you might not let employees take responsibility because it could reflect poorly on you. At the first sign that an employee might falter, you rescue them. That makes it clear the employee doesn’t have to be accountable because you will be. High-accountability managers often breed low-accountability teams.
If being too scary doesn’t work, and neither does being too nice, what’s the path to foster a healthy form of accountability?
Rather than waiting for people to fail, great managers position them to succeed.
How to Foster Accountability
Fostering accountability requires effective management from the start. Rather than waiting for people to fail, great managers position them to succeed. Here’s how:
Set Clear Expectations
The most crucial phase in promoting accountability is the delegation stage. Define the outcomes you’re looking for in clear and objective terms. Hint: If you use adjectives to describe what you’re looking for, don’t be surprised if you don’t get what you want. Everyone has their own interpretation of what “innovative”, “collaborative”, or “succinct” means. Stick to cut-and-dry nouns and verbs to get what you want.
Effective delegation paints a picture of what “good” looks like, but also of what “too good” looks like. You don’t want time and energy going into something beyond what’s fit for purpose. Furthermore, you need to be clear about what types of issues you want them to handle on their own, and which require your involvement?
Most efforts to foster accountability should be done before anyone lifts a finger. Being clear upfront increases accountability and short-circuits excuses later. It’s time well spent.
Manage Attention and Energy
Another way that managers set people up to fail is by heaping too many priorities on them at once. For 500 years, there was no such thing as the plural of priority. (It comes from the Latin priori, which means first, so it makes sense that you can’t have multiple firsts.) Now, we expect people to pay attention to and manage several competing priorities simultaneously. It’s not working.
Your responsibility as a manager is to help employees know what comes first, second, and third. You must continually (and ruthlessly) delete, delay, distribute, and diminish their tasks. Managing your team’s attention and energy will make a massive difference to their willingness and ability to deliver.
In my forthcoming book, I argue that it’s not the workload that’s killing people; it’s the thoughtload — the combination of all we have to pay attention to, the emotional burden we’re carrying, and the depleted energy reserves we’re trying to do it with. If you can reduce your team’s thoughtload, you’ll unlock hidden capacity. Let me know if you’re interested in learning more about the book.
Make it Safe to Struggle
Once you’ve positioned them for success, you need to make it safe for them to struggle. Accountable people struggle because struggling is the opposite of giving up. Create an environment where people can attempt hard things, feel uncomfortable without feeling afraid, and ask for help early.
It’s a fallacy to think that accountable people don’t struggle. The difference is that they’re transparent about their vulnerability without ceding responsibility versus those who throw their hands up in the air and toss the accountability back to you (or pass the blame).
Don’t be afraid to let people be emotional. Make space for it and help them translate what they’re feeling into what they could do to move forward. When you invalidate or gloss over emotions, they go underground, where you can’t deal with them. Treat emotions as data, and your team will learn from them.
Provide Development Support
It’s 2025, we’re past thinking that “no news is good news,” right?!? Ongoing feedback, coaching, and course corrections help accountable people stay on track. But make sure you’re giving proper feedback, not just passing judgment. Judgment shuts down learning and can inhibit accountability.
Genuine feedback provides people insight about the impact of their choices. That’s why feedback is a gift; when you’re candid with them about what their choices make you think or feel, they can choose to act differently next time.
While feedback is an excellent tool in a manager’s toolkit, it’s not right for every situation. You’ll find that your employees learn and evolve more quickly as you shift away from judgment and learn to match different development dialogues such as feedback, instruction, advice, coaching, and evaluation to the situation.
Make it Count with Consequences
Now, what you’ve been waiting for (or maybe dreading): consequences. If you don’t have a steady stream of consequences for people’s performance, you’re not creating the loop that supports learning. I’m always surprised how few managers use consequences as a part of their toolkit. Instead, they ignore, nag, cave, rescue, and even retaliate rather than simply allowing the person’s behaviour to have an effect (positive or negative).
Great consequences have three things in common:
- They’re timely, so the brain connects the behaviour to the result. Consequences that come a month later don’t do much for learning.
- They’re natural. That is, they occur without you having to do anything. The person who does a shoddy job of a draft and then faces uncomfortable and challenging questions from their peers is experiencing a natural consequence.
- They promote accountability without creating fear. Your consequences must be tied to a choice the person made rather than to their character or abilities. Don’t tie the consequence to “being sloppy.” Tie it to “submitting a draft with three factual errors.
As people learn that their good work leads to positive consequences and their poor work leads to negative ones, they’ll be more motivated to perform well.
Redefining Accountability: Positioning Teams for Success
If you feel your organization has an employee accountability problem, you might want to check first if you have a manager effectiveness problem. Effective management is the secret to unlocking higher performance without resorting to fear. Set clear expectations, manage attention, make it safe to struggle, provide the proper development support, and make it count with consequences. That’s how you foster accountability without eroding empathy.
If you want to start this conversation with your organization’s managers, contact us today to learn more about Liane Davey and her “Proactive Accountability” keynote and/or workshop.
Known as the “teamwork doctor,” Liane has worked with organizations, including Fortune 500s, from across the globe, developing a unique perspective on the challenges that teams face today — and how to solve them. Her mission is to transform the way people communicate, connect, and contribute. Using her expertise in strategy and group dynamics, she delivers the perfect combination of education and entertainment that leaders and teams need to make an immediate impact on their organizations.
