"We need to hold people accountable!!"
We're back in the villa on Love Island USA, Season 8, this time for the Movie Night episode. So grab your popcorn! You're about to watch every islander witness the person they've been coupled up with for three weeks do all kinds of shady sh*t behind their backs. Jaws drop. Eyes avert. Heads shake in disbelief. And then, inevitably, the offending islander launches into some hybrid of a defense and an apology tour while everyone else demands "accountability".
And I realize, I don’t know what they’re actually asking for. What do they mean by accountability? I hear the word used so often now, but I think we've collectively lost track of what we’re reaching for when we say it.
And it’s not just on reality TV; I hear it from leaders and leadership teams all the time. It gets invoked when a founder plants their hands on the table after a rough quarter and says we need to hold our managers accountable. It gets used after a wave of resignations, a rocky opening, and a bad review nobody can stop thinking about. In every one of those instances, "accountability" means roughly the same thing: someone needs to say the right words, something needs to feel resolved, and we'd like to move on without doing very much to actually change anything.
That's not accountability.
Two Words We Use Interchangeably
We treat them like the same word, but they aren’t. Responsibility is the obligation to act and complete a task. Accountability is being answerable for how it turns out. You can delegate responsibility. You can hand the doing to someone else, but the ultimate ownership (accountability) stays with you, whether you want it to or not.
Which is exactly why so many leaders get this backwards. They delegate a task, and when it goes wrong, they act like accountability went with it. It didn't. It never does.
Things We Call Accountability
When a leader says, "We need to hold people accountable," in my opinion, they're almost always describing one of three things, none of which is actually accountability.
The first is consequences: a signal that someone will pay for what went wrong. That's a legitimate leadership tool, but consequences for someone who was never given the authority or the resources to succeed amount to punishment, and punishment only tells people what not to do. It doesn't build the behavior you actually want.
The second is an apology: an acknowledgement that harm was caused, that something wasn't okay. Also legitimate. Also not accountability. An apology closes a loop, maybe begins repair, and indicates remorse. Accountability is forward-facing; it asks what happens next.
The third, in my opinion, is the most common and the least examined: the leader just wants assurance it won't happen again. "Accountability" gets invoked not because anyone has a plan, but because saying it out loud feels like closing a door. We identified the problem, we named it, and it won't recur. Except nothing changed. No commitment was made, no structure was built, no real conversation happened. Just the word, invoked like a magic spell, as though saying it loudly enough turns it into a deterrent (the same goes for cancel culture, if you ask me). But without the conversations, without doing the work underneath it, we get the same disappointing result over and over and over.
Yves Morieux at BCG made an observation I return to regularly: organizations invest more in knowing who to blame when things fail than in creating the conditions for things to succeed. All three of these impulses are versions of that: backwards-looking, blame-informed, and a convenient place to set down the discomfort. And none of them produce anything (at least nothing productive).
What Did You Actually Handoff?
If accountability can't be delegated, then the first question was never "Who failed?" It's "What did I actually hand off, and what did I keep?"
Did the person have the authority to make the call, or did they need a sign-off that was slow or never came? Did they get the resources to do the job, or just the job title? Was there a check-in along the way, or did leadership set a goal in January and reappear in April to ask what happened?
In hospitality this gap is everywhere. A GM is told to "own the culture" with no budget for training. A director is asked to "drive retention" with no authority over scheduling or pay. The responsibility got handed down; the authority did not. So when the outcome falls short and the leader calls for accountability, they are the one still holding it.
Call it what it is: the leader delegated the task, kept the power, and is now asking someone else to answer for an outcome they were never equipped to control.
Where The Blame Lands
None of this is ever really a surprise. The behavior rarely changes on its own. What changes is the moment the cost of looking away finally exceeds the cost of seeing.
And when it’s finally time to point a finger, watch where the blame lands. Accountability, as it works in most organizations, gets thrown towards the less powerful, and it stops the moment it reaches someone with enough standing to redirect it: someone essential enough to protect and senior enough to decide who answers instead of them. Write-ups, warnings, and PIPs rarely reach the C-suite. What this says about how institutions are run is that visibility of failure matters more than the failure itself. The threshold for consequence isn't "this caused harm." It's "this is now hard to ignore."
A founder who preaches accountability to the leadership team while never examining their own role in the conditions that produced the problem isn't a hypocrite, exactly. They're doing the thing we just described: handing down the responsibility, keeping the power, and calling the gap between the two someone else's failure.
So the question worth holding onto, whenever someone calls for accountability, is whether it runs both ways. Is the leader answerable to the team for the direction they set, the resources they provided, or the culture they built or let rot? This should not be a rhetorical exercise, but an active practice visible to the people they're asking it of.
What Accountability Requires
Accountability that functions, that changes behavior and builds trust, has a few consistent features, none of which are complicated, all of which require doing them before something goes wrong.
A clear handoff: here's the responsibility I'm delegating; here's the authority and resources that come with it; here's what success looks like. Said out loud, ideally written down, and agreed to by everyone involved, not assumed.
A check-in structure that keeps the leader's own accountability active, not dormant until something breaks. If the first time a leader weighs in on a goal is when it's been missed, that doesn't count as a check-in.
And when things go wrong, a genuine inquiry: what happened? What did we miss? What needs to change, including what I missed, what I should have caught, and where my own ownership of this fell short. Not "Who is responsible for this?" (or, my personal favorite, “How did we not know this?”) as a closing statement, but as an actual opening question. If you know me, you know I can't say the words "be curious" enough.
The difference between accountability as theater and accountability as practice is whether the person at the top keeps holding their share of it or quietly hands it off the second something goes wrong and calls that handoff "accountability".
So the next time someone plants both hands on the table and says we need to hold people accountable, you'll know what to listen for.
And the islanders? They’re making decisions on which couples get to stay in the villa based on whose karaoke performance they liked the best, so perhaps they are not our gold standard. They'll probably keep demanding "accountability", but at least they say it to each other's faces.
If you're trying to build something that works like real accountability in your own organization, I'm always happy to talk through what that looks like in practice. Be curious. I'll see you next time.
