An Accountability Problem in Disguise

When leadership teams talk about execution, the conversation often turns quickly to priorities, resources, talent, process, and market conditions. All of those things matter. But in my experience, many execution problems have a more human source. They sit in the gaps between leaders.

They show up in the moments when peers do not get clear with each other. When assumptions go untested. When cross-functional friction is tolerated rather than addressed. When a leadership team discusses strategy at a high level but does not create enough clarity around ownership, tradeoffs, decision-making, and follow-through.

This is where peer accountability matters.

I have said for years that accountability is not punitive; it’s not about calling someone out or catching someone doing something poorly. It is not a consequence or an outcome.. It is not justice or feeling better about answering the emotional need your anger or frustration is seeking. Accountability is an act of clarity. Its purpose is to create personal ownership around actions, inactions, decisions, and impact. And if you can name it you can own it. If you can own it, you can change it. If there is no ownership, especially at the top of an organization or division, there is no real change.

That principle matters even more on a leadership team than it does anywhere else.

Peer accountability is not the same as managing down

Most leaders have at least some experience holding direct reports accountable. Fewer are truly practiced at holding peers accountable. And fewer still know how to do it in a way that builds trust rather than drama. And drama–all the hand-wringing, meetings before the meetings and meetings after the meetings, side conversations, waiting, and emotional energy detracting from actual work–is super expensive as time is money and these are your top paid people.

On a leadership team, accountability cannot rely on hierarchy alone. It has to become a shared practice. It has to live in the way peers speak to one another about commitments, decisions, missed handoffs, competing priorities, and the real effects their functions have on one another.

This is one reason I often say your conversations are your relationships.

If accountability is weak between peers, trust becomes fragile, alignment becomes performative, and execution slows down. Leaders may remain polite. They may stay agreeable in meetings. But they leave important things unsaid, and the organization pays the price for that silence. This is true more so now than ever in that the price of leadership silence has gone up due to the uncertainty leaders are currently operating under.

In other words, the absence of peer accountability creates real drag.

The strategy-execution gap belongs to the leadership team

I think we are often too quick to describe the strategy-execution gap as though it were an operational problem somewhere lower in the organization. In many cases, it is a leadership team problem first.

Strategy breaks down when leaders are not clear with one another about what matters most. It’s the job of leaders to create focus and to sustain it until the results are in. It breaks down when priorities compete and no one names the conflict. It breaks down when one function experiences the behavior of another as inconsistent, unclear, late, reactive, or self-protective, but nobody addresses it directly. It breaks down when leaders protect turf instead of building shared ownership.

Research supports the importance of this. PwC’s 28th Annual Global CEO Survey found that only about 38% of CEOs say their company has made at least some progress in reinventing its business model, even as pressure for adaptation continues to rise, underscoring how difficult it is for organizations to translate strategic intent into coordinated change And McKinsey has long noted that transformations fail not just because of poor ideas, but because of breakdowns in alignment, coordination, and leadership behavior during execution. (McKinsey, “Unlocking success in digital transformations,” 2023.)

To me, this is exactly the point. The leadership team is not merely the sponsor of strategy. It is the first operating system for execution.

If leaders cannot create clarity with one another, they should not be surprised when the rest of the organization struggles to execute clearly.

Accountability creates the conditions for operational learning

This is where my thinking on accountability and operational learning continues to deepen.

A leadership team should not only be reviewing outcomes. It should be learning from the way outcomes are being produced. That means looking at execution as a living system. Where are decisions getting stuck? Where are handoffs weak? Where is the organization overcompensating for lack of clarity? Where are workarounds becoming normal? Where does silence exist where learning should be happening?

Operational learning requires more than a dashboard review. It requires the willingness to make reality discussable.

And that is one of the most valuable things accountability does well.

When accountability is practiced as clarity, peers can examine what is happening without collapsing into blame or defensiveness. They can name what is not working. They can verify assumptions. They can see their own contribution to the problem. They can identify where ownership is missing. And from there, they can improve the system, not just react to the symptom.

This is one reason I do not see accountability and learning as separate conversations. Done well, accountability is one of the main pathways into learning.

Amy Edmondson’s work on teams and psychological safety is often interpreted as support for comfort, but her work is far more useful than that. Learning environments require candor, openness, and the ability to discuss errors and risks in real time. Psychological safety without accountability does not produce high standards; it produces ambiguity. The strongest teams combine both (The Fearless Organization, Wiley, 2018; also HBR, 2019).

Trust is not built by avoiding hard conversations

One of the biggest myths on leadership teams is that trust is preserved by keeping the peace, treading lightly around politically charged organizational issues, restraining or holding back on topics because the president or CEO “won’t like it.” The absence of conflict is not harmony, it’s apathy.

It’s a mistake to think trust is preserved. It is not. What is preserved is comfort.

Trust may feel protected in the short term when leaders avoid tension, soften every challenge, or wait too long to address what is obvious. But over time, avoidance erodes credibility. It weakens confidence. It increases second-guessing. And it often pushes frustration into side conversations instead of the room where it belongs.

Relationship building is trust building. But relationships are not strengthened by vagueness. They are strengthened when people can talk about the right things and the hard things with clarity, courage, and enough humility to keep learning.

That is the standard.

This also aligns with broader workforce research. Gallup continues to find that trust in leadership, role clarity, and opportunities for meaningful feedback are tightly connected to engagement and performance outcomes. We do not get engaged, accountable organizations by asking for more engagement. Engagement is an outcome. It is what you get when management and leadership get better at clarity, ownership, and follow-through.

What this asks of a leadership team

A leadership team that wants stronger execution has to do more than set direction. It has to practice a different level of conversation.

It has to ask:

• Where are we unclear with one another?
• What are we not saying because we are trying to be nice?
• Where is there shared ownership in theory but not in practice?
• What execution problems are actually relationship problems between leaders?
• What are we learning operationally from the way work is moving across the enterprise?
• Where do we need more clarity, not more spin?

That is peer accountability.

Not judgement. Not posturing. Not catching each other doing something wrong.

Clarity. Ownership. Learning. Improvement.

And yes, trust.

A final thought

If this work feels uncomfortable, that does not mean it is wrong. It usually means the stakes are real.

Most leadership teams do not need more language about alignment. They need more practice creating it. Alignment, after all, is a conversation–an on-going conversation throughout strategic execution. That happens in the way peers hold one another to clarity around commitments, decisions, behavior, and impact. It happens in the way they learn from execution together. And it happens in the way they stay in relationship while doing hard things well.

That is the work.

It is certainly work worth practicing at an off-site. But it is even more important that it show up in the ordinary rhythm of leadership meetings, operating reviews, and real-time decisions. Because that is where culture gets built, trust gets tested, and strategy either moves or stalls.

If leadership teams want better execution, stop looking to the rest of the business and look to themselves first, they need better accountability.

Organizational change (improvements) only come when you as the leader change first. A culture of accountability is only possible when a leadership team practice it with each other first.