“We need more accountability in the business.”

I hear a version of that line in nearly every business I go into. Sometimes it’s from the founder or sometimes it’s from someone three levels down who’s fed up and has been for a while.

And it’s almost always said with real feeling.

But when I ask what accountability would look like on a Tuesday morning, people tend to go quiet.

Accountability is one of the few problems I see in every single client organisation I work within. People talk about it a lot. But very few have worked out how to turn that talk into something that happens.

So let me have a go at that this week and share some of the things I work on with clients who need to tackle accountability

What we’re actually talking about

Let’s start with a quick reminder of what I mean because the word gets used pretty loosely.

Accountability is when someone becomes answerable for achieving a defined outcome. They take on the decisions, the actions and the work needed to get there. Crucially they also accept the consequences of it happening or not.

Two things follow from that and both matter on practice.

Accountability is only ever taken. You can’t give it to someone, however hard you try. What you can do as a leader is create the conditions where someone chooses to take it.

And it can’t be shared. That means one outcome can only be owned by one person. You can nest it – break your own accountability down and create the conditions for others to take accountability for the more granular pieces – but nesting isn’t sharing and it definitely doesn’t get you off the hook for the whole thing.

That’s the theory and I’ve written about it before. The harder question is what you do on a Monday morning to turn that theory into practice.

I’d say there are three things that I learnt as an MD running a digital agency a decade or so back.

1. Expectations that are understood, not just communicated

Most founders I work with think they’ve already done this bit. They’ve said what they want. Often more than once.

But saying it isn’t the same as it being understood. And being understood isn’t the same as commitment.

The outcome needs to be specific enough that two people would agree on whether it had been achieved. Not “improve client retention” but the number, by the date, measured in the way you’ve agreed. That sounds obvious written down. It’s remarkable how rarely it happens up in real conversations.

Then there’s the why. People take accountability for outcomes they think matter. They can’t decide whether it matters if nobody’s explained how it connects to where the business is heading.

This is where having a clear direction plays a key role, whether you call it a vision, a strategy or a goal. It doesn’t much matter what you call it as long as it’s simple, shared and understood.

And wherever you can, involve people in shaping the outcome rather than handing it over finished. It’s slower. But it’s also makes the difference between someone nodding and someone taking genuinely taking on accountability.

The test I use is a simple one: can they say it back to you in their own words, including why it matters? If they can only repeat your words, you’ve communicated. You haven’t yet got commitment.

2. Holding to account, clearly, fairly and regularly

This is the step almost everyone skips and it’s the vital one.

Let me start with what it isn’t because I see the failure modes here far more often than I see it done well.

It isn’t a weekly update where someone reports and nobody asks anything. You know how these chats go: “How’s the retention project going?” “Yeah, all good.” “Great, next.” That meeting exists so everyone can feel like something is being managed. Nobody leaves it knowing anything they didn’t know before.

It also isn’t the conversation that only happens after something’s gone wrong. That’s reactive accountability: people putting their hand up for a failure they took no real steps to prevent. It can look impressive in the moment and it changes very little. What you want is people on the front foot, scanning for what might get in the way and dealing with it early.

It’s also not giving someone a MI5 style interrogation with the intent to find a problem or a personal failing. Holding to account shouldn’t be seen as a quest to always find things wrong.

And it shouldn’t ever be a surprise. If the first proper conversation about an outcome is the one where you tell someone it’s been missed, that’s a failure of rhythm rather than a failure of theirs.

So what does it look like when it’s done well?

It has a rhythm and the rhythm is boring.

You use the same cadence, same shape of chat, whether things are going well or badly. Regularity is what stops it feeling like an intervention.

Nobody should be reading anything into being asked.

It’s forward-looking rather than retrospective.

The most useful question isn’t “did you hit it?” but “what could get in the way of you hitting it and what are you doing about that now?”

I like that one because it helps surface potential problems while there’s still time to do something with it. It’s about the outcome, not the activity.

Remember “I’m super busy” is not the same being on track to hit an outcome.

A lot of these conversations quietly drift into a list of things done, because that list is easier to produce and much easier to hear.

A better approach is to ensure it’s genuinely a two-way converation.

“What do you need from me?” is part of holding someone to account rather than a softening of it. Quite often the honest answer is a decision you’ve been sitting on.

Holding to account happens when things are going well too – remember it’s a repetitive rhythm. If the only time you ask questions is when you’re worried, people learn to read meaning into the meeting invite rather than the question.

Last week I wrote about Ben Tye’s line on getting curious before you get directive, and it applies here more than anywhere.

My own instinct in these conversations, like most operators, is to start solving.

And every time I do that I take back a bit of the accountability I was trying to build.

To be honest a that’s still a thing I have to consciously check myself on. Ask first. Sit with the answer a moment longer than feels comfortable.

Consequences that are clear, understood and go both ways

If nothing happens either way at the end of a goal-setting period, the outcome you wanted was never really an outcome.

This is the step businesses find most uncomfortable. Some avoid the conversation altogether, so it goes unsaid and everyone privately assumes something different.

Others over-index on the negative and end up somewhere worse, where accountability comes to mean waiting to find out how much trouble you’re in.

But the bigger mistake I see is treating every accountability as though it needs the same kind of consequence.

It really doesn’t and getting this wrong causes a lot of damage.

For the simple, repetitive stuff at work, be mechanical about it.

I’m talking about timesheets, expenses or sales getting the signed contract back into the folder where finance can find it.

Nobody’s career is defined by any of this and nobody finds it interesting.

But effective information sharing is a key connective tissue of a well-run business, and when it slips everything after it gets harder for someone else.

Here the consequence should be known in advance and slightly boring.

A three strikes approach works well. First time, a quiet automated nudge. Second time, a proper conversation with your manager about what’s getting in the way, because sometimes there’s a real reason. Third time, a formal conversation with a consequence attached. Nobody is remotely surprised by it because you set all those consequences out at the start.

The point isn’t punishment – it’s taking individual judgement out of it. When the response to a missed timesheet depends on the mood of a manager, people spend their energy reading the room rather than doing the thing.

And it has to apply to everyone, leadership team included. The fastest way to teach people in an organisation that timesheets don’t matter is for the founder to be three weeks behind on theirs.

For the complex stuff, that same approach can do real harm.

If we’re talking bigger, more complex outcomes like landing a major new client programme, pulling off a systems migration or opening up a new market you need a different approach.

If you attach escalating negative consequences to outcomes with real uncertainty in them, people quietly play games. They pad the estimate. They choose the safer option. And they stop telling you about the problem while it’s still small and cheap to fix.

You end up with a leadership team who mostly hit their numbers and have stopped attempting anything that might not work. Risk taking reduces and that hurts the entrepreneurial side of a scaling business.

I’ve seen that happen in businesses where nobody would say they had a psychological safety problem, because from the inside those behaviours seem sensible in response to the organisational context they’re operating in.

So on the complex accountabilities, the consequence needs to attach to how someone held the accountability as well as whether the outcome was hit. Arguable the “how” is just as important as the outcome.

Did they flag the risk while there was still time? Did they make the call with the information they had rather than waiting? Did they tell you when it turned? Has the business learnt something useful from it?

Someone who missed the target and did all of that has probably done the job pretty well. In scaling businesses no outcome is certain and we operate in situations with a lot of ambiguity. The outcome is important to the business but doesn’t correlate tightly with what an individual did in their work to achieve that outcome.

But someone who hit an outcome it by sitting on a problem for six weeks and getting a bit lucky hasn’t really been that effective.

If your consequences can’t tell those two people apart, you’ll end up with more of the second sort.

And I also recommend you make the positive consequences relevant to the person.

This is where most businesses are laziest. Money matters, of course, but it’s rarely the only thing that moves someone and often it isn’t the strongest.

What lands is specific and personal. For one person it’s the piece of work they’ve been quietly angling for. For another it’s a budget they get to control, or being the one who takes it to the board, or simply being asked what they’d like to do next.

The only reliable way to know which is to ask them. It’s a better conversation than most founders expect and it doesn’t take long.

You also have to decide, as a leader, how much of a problem it is when someone doesn’t take accountability for something where you’ve genuinely created the conditions for success. That’s a real decision and avoiding it teaches everyone else that none of this is all that serious.

Where it actually starts

One last thing and it’s probably the most useful bit.

The businesses I’ve worked with that have the strongest cultures of accountability aren’t the ones with the best framework. They’re the ones that pay attention to the small things at work.

I mean things like meetings that start on time, actions from a fortnight ago that get picked back up without anyone chasing or a thing someone said they’d do and did.

Accountability for the small everyday stuff is what normalises accountability for the big things. That scales as you grow. Whatever you’re building later on sits on those foundations.

So three questions to have a think about with this week:

• Where in your business is someone reporting rather than being held to account and how long has that been true?
• When did you last ask what might get in the way, rather than whether something’s track?
• Are you attaching the same kind of consequence to a missed timesheet as to a missed programme? What might that be teaching people about which risks are worth taking?

I’m always happy to talk any of this through. Getting accountability working properly is some of the most satisfying work I do with founders and I find I learn something new about it on nearly every engagement.