A Leader Who Inspires Ownership

Based on my own experience, I’ve been disappointed in seeing leaders who aren’t compassionate or know how to say sorry or admit to mistakes made. This inability to accept responsibility results in leaders who regularly make excuses, shift blame, ultimately create a toxic work environment.

I never look to blame others; I will always stand with my team, own up to mistakes, and find opportunities to learn and grow from any missteps along the way. Our ability to learn as leaders ensures we’re always improving, always finding new ways to solve problems, galvanise our teams, and drive performance across the organisation. And there is no better teacher in life than failure.

Leaders who hold themselves accountable inspire others to take responsibility and follow through on their commitments. A lack of accountability in leadership can lead to misalignment, miscommunication, lack of ownership, and a failure to execute on strategic initiatives.

Accountability starts from the top down. The Workplace Accountability Study surveyed over 40,000 participants across a wide variety of industries and organisations. It found that 84% of those surveyed cite the way leaders behave as the single most important factor influencing accountability in their organisations. And yet just 15% of leaders have successfully clearly defined and broadly communicated their key results.

The Differences Between Accountability and Responsibility

Responsibility is a concept that focuses on tasks and duties as responsibilities are assigned with the expectation that you will achieve certain results or complete whatever tasks are set before you. Meanwhile, accountability can include responsibility, but goes further to ensure you not only accept responsibility and own it but are answerable for the outcome of your actions. Moreover, accountability is not to a task, but to company culture (stated mission, vision, values, and purpose) and to other people like your team members, subordinates, superiors, shareholders, and clients. True accountability means that you are willing to answer for how your decisions and actions affect an outcome. Accountable leaders clearly communicate their goals to their teams to foster alignment and focus.

Owning mistakes is a key aspect of accountability, and it’s also the first step to learning from inevitable missteps while continuing to move forward. A manager may fail to provide clear direction to an employee taking on a new task, for example, which results in poor performance. By acknowledging the mistake in not providing better guidance, that manager can improve such instruction going forward.?

When you agree to be held accountable for something, you are effectively giving your word that you will do everything you can to produce the desired results by honouring your commitments, owning up to mistakes, and giving credit where its due. A key component of this is embedding transparency into company culture, setting clear goals, explaining how performance is measured, and regularly keeping people informed about changes as they happen.

This is critical as a Gallup report?found that only 14% of employees feel their performance is managed in a way that motivates them while only 26% get feedback less than once per year. Regular assessment and clear metrics go a long way to ensuring accountability and visibility are part of the company’s culture and ethos.

How to Create a Culture of Accountability

Some leaders view accountability and empathy as mutually exclusive — they fear that if they show empathy, sympathy, or compassion to people, they’ll be less effective in holding them accountable. However, according to?a study by the Society for Human Resource Management, the most effective leaders are those who figure out how to embrace accountability and empathy to foster a working environment of high performance and trust.

For example, I worked in China many years – where leaders who were friendly and understanding and tried to care for their employees were often seen as not “tough enough”. I think this type of concept still exists in some specific environments, perhaps still until today in China although to a lesser extent. But an employee should never confuse friendliness of a leader with weakness.

I’ve also heard from a friend who worked at a national bank in Australia that the tone used in workplace communication is extremely rude and aggressive. While he got along with it well, he might be the exception as this type of culture breeds fear, which may motivate people initially, but ultimately leads to a toxic environment.

As noted in a 2022 study, toxic leadership affects 20-30% of leaders globally, disrupting organisational function for personal gain, which significantly hinders workplace culture and employee wellbeing.

The study also highlighted a specialty division in healthcare that experienced a rapid decline in workplace culture due to the toxic behaviours of a newly appointed division chief, which led to increased complaints and ultimately the leader's forced resignation.

This case study illustrates the importance of supportive measures for staff, decisive HR departments that can monitor progress and enforce professional boundaries, plus ongoing mechanisms to identify and manage toxic leadership effectively, including performance evaluation and legal protocols for disciplinary action.

A Healthy Work Environment

A good leader knows how to find the right balance between compassion and accountability. This means being fair when it comes to decision making and responsibility, standing up to protect your team and the values you work towards, but then also being tough with all fairness towards the organisation and other employees when lines are being crossed. Leaders who see their team members as whole human beings rather than merely employees create an environment and culture where people feel supported and valued.

A healthy work environment is one where leadership invests in talent development including mentoring programs. They also create a system of checks and balances to ensure leaders are held accountable for their actions and employees can raise concerns when leaders aren’t acting appropriately.?Providing anonymous channels ensures employees can safely provide feedback to leaders at all levels.

Clarity is critical to creating accountability, which begins at the top. When the organisation’s strategy, values, and goals are clear, it’s easier for leaders to work with their teams on meaningful individual goals. When everyone is aligned on priorities and company values, leaders can ensure stakeholder buy-in and provide targeted and constructive feedback.

Feedback can come in many forms, playing a pivotal role in ensuring ongoing improvement. For example, formal performance reviews are regularly scheduled feedback sessions where employees and leaders receive feedback about their performance from superiors.

Meanwhile 360-degree feedback is comprehensive, involving peers, subordinates, supervisors, and sometimes even external stakeholders like clients to provide a holistic view of performance. There are also self-assessments, one-on-one Meetings and check-ins, team-based feedback, plus coaching and mentoring.

Every type of feedback is instrumental; from the affirming tones of positive and recognition-based feedback to the growth-focused insights of constructive and developmental critiques. Giving and receiving feedback are vital elements in creating a work environment where communication is clear, consistent, and constructive.

Context, Communication, and Change Management

Good leaders clearly communicate the information, inputs, and results they expect. They know how to actively listen and speak plainly, which encourages more accountability across their team. I call this ‘humble confidence’, whereby leaders exude the kind of positive authority that earns people’s trust. This can be built through even the smallest of gestures, like thinking and speaking in terms of “we” rather than “I”.

Communicating clearly is an important skill, but we can’t share everything with everyone. Effective leaders share what’s necessary to help people feel secure, helping the team understand their roles and goals and to understand the big picture so that they can better align with their actions. Employees should feel free to ask questions that help them interpret the information shared, understand what the business is looking for, and how they contribute to the company’s overarching mission.

Context, clarity, and clear communication – together these three elements create an environment where people feel safe enough to take risks, speak openly, and welcome disagreement as a means of understanding more and improving upon the status quo.

A review of 20 years of research about organisational change found that 50-75% of change initiatives fail with culture change efforts seeing the highest rates of failure. An important component is this statistic is communication – not just from leadership to employees but also in terms of employee input and stakeholder engagement. Designing change based on employees’ experiences and needs is vital to ensuring seamless transformation, but that’s only possible when team members are actively involved in designing, implementing, and measuring the progress of that change.

Throughout my career, I’ve seen how poor communication and a lack of accountability have created work environments and cultures where people are afraid to speak up. I’ve seen leaders who are quick to blame but slow to own up to their own mistakes.

When leaders actively work to empower their team members, there’s more clarity, more ownership and more psychological safety within the workplace, which goes a long way to ensuring people perform better, feel secure, and want to stick around long term and contribute something meaningful to the business.