11 Ways to Improve Accountability
Watch/Listen here or on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts“I believe as the leadership team goes, so goes the rest of the company. So if you don't have that consistent and significant sustainable growth, you've got some work to do.” — Mike Goldman
Most missed goals aren't due to laziness; they're due to a lack of follow-up and accountability. In this episode, I dig into the real reasons accountability breaks down and share 11 powerful ways to fix it.
The Accountability Challenge
Many leaders leave meetings energized, only to find no progress weeks later.
The issue is usually follow-up, not laziness.
Accountability often has a negative connotation and is misunderstood or avoided.
Why Accountability Breaks Down
Lack of clarity: Confusion around expectations and the difference between responsibility and accountability.
Inconsistent follow-up: Leaders swing between micromanagement and hands-off.
Poor modeling: Leaders not demonstrating accountability themselves.
As a leader, you get what you tolerate and what you model.
Key Definitions
Responsibility: Anyone contributing effort to a task or goal.
Accountability: One person owns the outcome and drives results.
11 Ways to Increase Accountability
1. KPI Accountability
Everyone needs 1–3 clear, measurable outcomes (KPIs).
Include both lagging (results) and leading (activities) indicators.
Avoid overwhelming teams with too many metrics.
2. Behavioral Accountability
Define 3–6 non-negotiable core values as observable behaviors.
Culture fit matters as much as performance.
Toxic behavior can’t be overlooked even when KPIs are strong.
3. Functional Accountability
Every function (Sales, Marketing, Finance, etc.) should have one and only one person accountable.
When multiple people are “accountable,” no one is.
4. Project or Priority Accountability
Assign one owner for each major project or initiative.
That person must ensure value is delivered, even without full authority.
5. Task Accountability
Use a simple “Who-What-When” method during meetings.
One person must own each task, even if others are responsible for helping.
Meeting Rhythms to Drive Accountability
6. Quarterly Planning Meetings
Review previous quarter’s results and set new priorities.
Assign ownership and clarify measures of success.
7. Weekly Accountability Meetings
Focus only on red or yellow items, not status updates.
Hold people accountable to prior commitments, not excuses.
8. Weekly One-on-Ones
Alternate between:
Accountability and Feedback: Leader-led review of tasks, KPIs, behaviors.
Coaching: Team member-led discussion to seek support and guidance.
9. Cascading Communication
At the end of each meeting, clarify:
What decisions were made
What needs to be communicated to others
What stays confidential
10. Use a Planning Tool
Use software (like Metronome Growth Systems) or spreadsheets to track KPIs, rocks, tasks, and ownership.
Helps manage by exception and maintain visibility.
Model Accountability
11. Model It Yourself
Leaders must keep commitments, admit when they slip, and ask for help.
Accountability is not about perfection—it's about ownership.
Create a culture of openness and honesty around commitments.
Thanks for listening!
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Have you ever left a meeting feeling incredibly energized? You know, you made the right decision, you assign the right action. Everyone's was excited about moving forward, and then two weeks later, nothing happens. If you're a leader, I'm sure at some point. Hopefully not a lot of points, but I'm sure at some point that's happened to you.
Most missed goals are not due to laziness. Most missed goals are really a follow up and accountability failure. A plan without accountability is like a gym membership. You never use lots of potential, but zero results and having the right. Accountability. The right follow up could be the difference between frustration and freedom as an individual, as a company, uh, you know, as a team.
Now we're gonna talk about accountability here, and leaders tend to hate this topic. Because they find it so difficult. The biggest complaint I get all the time from CEOs and senior leaders is, you know, what do I need to do to hold my people accountable? do I just need to fire everybody? If they don't do what they commit to do, it's, it's like this secret that, that they've yet to uncover.
How do I hold people accountable? So leaders hate the topic because. It's, it seems to be difficult to figure out, and also because accountability has this negative connotation. It's just the hammer we hit people with when they don't do their jobs. So leaders hate this topic, but I love this topic because there are so many good answers to that question.
It's not a difficult one to execute on if you just. Shine the light on some of the right behaviors, and that's what we're gonna talk about today.
but first I want to talk about why accountability tends to break down. and it's a few reasons that the, the one biggest reason I think is a lack of clarity around what we're holding people accountable for.
A lack of clarity first. Believe it or not, around what accountability or, or, or when you say someone is accountable for something, what does that even mean and how is it different than responsibility? So, one area, of lack of clarity's, just what does the word mean? The other is, is a lack of clarity around specific expectations.
You know, telling someone in. You know who owns who, who's accountable for marketing. You know, we, you know, we need more leads. We need more marketing qualified leads. That's not clear enough. Very often that's even clearer than we typically are. We don't even know it's marketing qualified leads. We just say we need to do a better job of marketing.
What does that mean? We're not clear about our expectations. So part of it's lack of clarity and, and we're gonna dive into that, but it's also a lack of a rhythm. There's no process or rhythm for follow up. Leaders swing from babysitting and micromanaging to giving people so much rope that, you know, they're never held accountable and they swing back and forth.
Between detailed follow up and no follow up, and it confuses everyone. They're not sure what to expect from you as their leader.
The other reason for a lack of accountability is leaders who don't model. Accountability. I remember a client I had, you know, many years ago, about 10 or 11 years ago, was consistently complaining about his team, that they weren't doing what they committed to, they weren't being accountable, but the main reason they weren't being accountable is that he wasn't being accountable.
There were some major things he was supposed to do that he didn't do. So he was modeling for them exactly what they were giving back to him. The bottom line is you get, as a leader, two things. You get what you tolerate and you get what you model. I'm gonna say that again. You get what you tolerate and you get what you model.
So we're gonna dive in to 11 ways. That's right. 11 ways to increase accountability. Now, I know 11 is overwhelming, so you may not implement all 11, or my guess is you've already implemented a few of these, but I wanna give you 11 ways. Pick a few. Pick one that you're not doing and implement it, but don't get overwhelmed.
I'm gonna give you 11 and we're gonna start, before I even get into the 11, we're gonna start with a definition.
Of what accountability means, and more specifically, there are two words that are used interchangeably, and I've talked about this on other podcasts. We're gonna talk about it again. There are two words that are used interchangeably, and those words are accountability and responsibility.
And using them interchangeably without clear definitions causes mass confusion. Within the organization, a mass frustration for the leader who believes people are not being accountable. But it's because you're not clear on what it means. So, so let me, let me give you the definition. I use the definition my clients use.
I don't care what it says on dictionary.com or wherever we're looking up words these days. I'm gonna give you a definition that works for me. More importantly, it works for my clients. Responsibility, Is who is rolling up their sleeves to get a job done. That could be one person that could be a thousand people.
If you have a leadership team working for you, in my definition of responsibility, it might be fair. Would be fair for you to say to your team, we are all responsible for giving our clients wow levels of service because at some level, directly or indirectly, they're all rolling up their sleeves to make sure the end result is your client gets a level of service that wows them.
So responsibility could be one person, could be a thousand people. It's who's rolling up their sleeves to get the job done. Accountability is always and only one person. One person who owns that function or that project or that priority or that task. and what I mean by own it. And if we go back to the example of creating wow levels of service while 500 people might be responsible for giving clients wow levels of service. You as our VP of client experience, congrats on your demotion or promotion. I'm not sure, but you as our VP of client experience, are accountable for giving our clients wow, levels of service. That means you own. Defining what wow levels of service means. You own the strategy to get there.
The way we're gonna measure whether we're getting there, the plan, and how the rest of the team could help. If you are in the green, you're gonna get a big pat on the back. For wowing our clients. If you are in the red or the yellow, as a leadership team, we're gonna look to you to say, what's the plan and how could we help?
So accountability is always one and only one person that owns whatever that task project priority function is.
That being said, let's start with 11 ways to improve accountability. And the first five are actually just different types of accountability that you wanna make sure you are defining.
So method number one, to improve your level of accountability is to make sure you have crystal clear KPI, accountability that everyone on the team, including you, even if you are the CEO, the owner, the founder, everyone on the team needs crystal clear KPI, key Performance Indicator Responsibility. Other ways to say that is everyone needs clear measures of success. For their role within the company.
Everyone needs measurable outcomes. Telling your head of marketing that sales needs more leads. We need you to bring in more leads. Is not crystal clear KPI Accountability, crystal clear KPI Accountability is saying we need to see at least 15 new marketing qualified leads every week. Now KPI accountability doesn't mean.
That everyone on your team should have 28 different KPIs they're coming to you with and being held accountable for. That's a whole lot of information with zero knowledge and zero actionability. And I'll keep using marketing as an example. If you are the head of marketing or the head of marketing is someone that works for you.
That head of marketing may have 28 different ways she is measuring how marketing is going. That may be the case, but that head of marketing should be held accountable for one or two or three most important measures of success. Some of them may be. Lagging KPIs, which are measures of results.
Anything on your profit and loss statement is a lagging KPI a measure of a result for marketing. A marketing qualified lead is a lagging measure. The measure of a result for whoever owns sales new revenue per month. Is a lagging indicator, a lagging KPI for sales, A leading KPI or for anyone. A leading KPI is the measure of an activity that drives a result for, so for sales, it may be the number of sales meetings with key decision makers per week, some specific number that they're being held accountable for.
So we need KPI accountability, not 28 KPIs, but one or two or three or or four at the most. And ideally it's some combination of both lagging and leading KPIs. I have another podcast all about how not to screw up KPIs if you want to dig deeper into KPIs. So number one is K is KPI Accountability.
Number two is behavioral accountability.
And this has to do with culture and core values. It's not enough that someone is being held accountable for specific measurable outcomes, measures of success, measures of productivity, but they need to be held accountable for being a strong culture fit. And more specifically. Being held accountable for some number three to six, ideally of non-negotiable behaviors that I call core values.
We need to hold people accountable if people are knocking their KPIs out of the park. But they are not consistently living your non-negotiable core values. They are toxic to the organization. So we need to be specific about those core values. Specific about the behaviors, I had one client in the renewable energy business who when I first started working with them, they had a core value of sustainability.
Now, while that sounds nice and it looks good on a website, especially if you're in the renewable energy business, what the hell does that mean as a behavior? Were they going and checking everyone's home to make sure they were recycling? They need your core values need to be non-negotiable behaviors.
And if someone is not living those behaviors. They need to be held to account for not living those behaviors. So number one technique method to improve accountability is to have crystal clear KPI accountability. Number two is to have crystal clear behavior, accountability, core values, accountability, culture fit, core value, uh, accountability.
Call it what you want, but it's about behaviors. Number three.
Is you need clear functional accountability. I alluded to that before when I talked about what the head of client experience may be accountable for, or sales or marketing for each function within your organization. Head of Company is a function, sales, marketing, finance, innovation, technology.
Human resources, et cetera, operations. Each one of those functions should have one and only one person accountable. Crystal clear accountability. And by the way, if you're a CEO and you have three people accountable. Quote unquote, accountable for sales. Remember, the rule is one and only one person accountable.
So if you believe you have three people accountable for sales surprise, you are actually accountable because you gotta play referee between those three people. You have to make sure there are standards of sales and follow up and measuring your pipeline across those three people. So we need functional accountability.
Do you have. Clarity around who that one person is accountable for marketing, for finance, for sales. Now that one goes together really well. The idea of functional accountability goes together really well with the first technique of having KPI accountability. Now KPIs, you wanna have KPI accountability up and down the organization from the CEO to the accounts payable clerk.
They ought to know what measurable outcomes they're accountable for, but specific to functional accountability, you could have functional accountability, but if you don't know how you are measuring the success of marketing or technology or human resources or finance. Then saying someone's accountable for finance without having KPI accountability.
You still don't have clarity there, so, so those two go together real nicely. So number one was KPI accountability. Number two, behavioral accountability. Number three, functional accountability.
Number four is project or priority accountability. And I'll use an example, that's a very common one. Let's say you have got a project to implement a new CRM system.
In my over 35 years in consulting and and coaching, I have seen this same conversation happen probably 50 times. A new CRM is supposed to go live. We're at the senior leadership team meeting. The head of technology says, Hey everybody, I've got great news. Last week on time and under budget, our new CRM system went live, and your head of technology expects that they're gonna get this glorious standing ovation and they hear silence.
Until the head of operations says that's wonderful that the CRM went live. I was under the impression that part of the value was that as the head of operations, my team would be able to look at the sales pipeline and use that to plan and manage our inventory well. The sales pipeline is so inaccurate that I can't even use it.
So who cares that the CRM went live with, that the head of sales says, damn right, the pipeline isn't accurate. I told you three months ago that if my salespeople need to go through 17 screens and spend three hours to enter a new opportunity, I ain't, that ain't happening. I'm not gonna have them do that.
My salespeople need to be out there selling. Not sitting behind their laptop, spending three hours entering a new opportunity. Here's the problem. All those three people are right. The head of technology implemented the technology. The head of operations is not able to do anything better in their job because it's been implemented. The head of sales is right. Their salespeople need to be out there selling. The problem is one of accountability. We had three people and probably more three people responsible for implementing the CRM. We did not have one person accountable
if one person was accountable not for implementing the technology. If one person was accountable for seeing the value, seeing the return on investment from that CRM. That leadership team would be having a much different conversation. Now, here's the problem. Let's say the head of sales is accountable for the successful implementation and the value resulting from the new CRM.
I've had head of sales say, Hey, Mike. How could you hold me accountable when I don't own the technology piece and I don't own what they're doing in operations or customer service? And my answer is, welcome to the world of senior leadership. In senior leadership. We get to sit around the, the big boy or big girl table.
We get paid the big bucks because sometimes we are held accountable for things. We don't have authority over or we don't have total control over. As a senior leader, we are paid for results and sometimes that means working with other teams like sales, working with technology or service or operations. We need one person accountable.
That was number four. Project or priority accountability.
Number five is task accountability. How many times have you been in a meeting? Where someone brings up a great idea and everybody says that was a great idea, and then you move on to the next agenda item and then you are two months later, you wonder why nothing happened.
Well, with my clients I use a very, uh, you know, a very complex tool called the who, what, when. It's a very simple three column spreadsheet. When a task comes up. In a meeting, you say, wait a minute. It sounds like we've got an action here. It sounds like we need to look into this whole net promoter system thing to better measure whether we're wowing our clients.
Who's accountable for that? What are they doing? What are they gonna have it done by? We need task accountability. And very often when I say, okay, it sounds like we've got a who, what, when, who's accountable for that? I will get answers like, oh, me and Joe will do it. Did I say that right? Is it me and Joe? Or Joe?
And I always get that screwed up, but me and Joe are gonna do it. And my answer very nicely is that's, thank you for telling me who's responsible. It's good to know that. Joe and yourself, or you and Joe again, my grammar's so bad. It's good to know that the two of you are working on this, but I need to know who the one person is accountable.
who is the one person that's gonna be accountable because without that one person, frankly, we have high school cafeteria bullshit conversations around the senior leadership table. You know, I, you know, I sent Joe the, the questions for the net promoter score survey, and he never got back to me.
Well, you know, I told you I was gonna be on vacation and I needed it the week before. It's like, really? Are we having that conversation? We need one person who owns it. That's number five. Task accountability. So those are the different types of accountability. There was KPI, accountability, behavior accountability, functional accountability project or priority accountability and task accountability.
Now I wanna go into, that's the first five. I wanna go, go into a few of the ways to follow up the specific meeting rhythm to help you follow up, and, and actually set these. Accountabilities.
And one is the, and this is number six, technique is the quarterly planning session with my clients. Those are either one or two day planning sessions where we do a whole host of things.
And looking back at performance date, looking forward, creating the next 90 day plan. What are our financial targets? what are our, our quarterly priorities, which we call rocks. We look at, uh, assessing the talent of the organization. We do a lot of things, but the most important thing we do before we leave that room in our quarterly plan is we say, what do we need to accomplish over the next 90 days?
Typical typically KPIs and priorities. What do we need to accomplish over the next 90 days? Who's accountable and how are we measuring that? So two things happen in the quarterly planning meeting that are super important. Number one is we're holding people accountable to their quarterly priorities from the last quarter and to their KPIs that they own.
And number two, we are, we are our defining and assigning accountability. For the next set of quarterly priorities or rocks and KPIs. So the quarterly planning meeting is critical to hold people accountable, but also define the new accountabilities. That's number six. Number seven is the weekly accountability meeting, which is a meeting of the senior leadership team.
Notice I did not say the weekly status meeting. Shoot me if I have to sit through another status meeting where everybody just talks about what they did and what they didn't do and what they're going to do and ah, I don't have time for that. I've got real work to do. The weekly accountability meeting is one whose focus is holding each member of the leadership team accountable for all the things we just talked about for their KPIs.
For their projects, for their priorities, for their tasks. When you talk about KPIs or or quarterly priorities or rocks, you know, are they red, yellow, or green? We need to have specific measures and know whether they're green, successful, yellow in some danger, red failing. And what that allows us to do in a weekly accountability meeting.
is manage by exception. If you are in the green, I might say, Hey, great news. You're in the green, you know, on this KPI or, or, you know, on your KPIs or, or with the rocks that you own. Is there anything we need to talk about? But you look like you're in the green. No, I'm good. Great. Let's keep moving.
So what we wanna focus on in the weekly accountability meeting is KPIs or rocks or tasks where people are in the yellow or the red, and let's figure out what we need to do to get back in the green and those weekly accountability meetings, I'm holding leaders accountable. If they're in the red or the yellow, they better come in with a plan.
Or at least a specific ask of the leadership team to help come up with a plan or execute the plan. And the big mistake I've seen in the weekly accountability meeting is the CEO will go around the room. And just accept every excuse from everybody on the team. First person said, well, I, I didn't accomplish my, my rock.
you know, I'm not on target with my rock. Uh, because, you know, you know, last week was, you know, a big fire drill and this happened and this happened. The CEO says, yeah, I get it. And then next person goes and says, well, you know, I've been so busy, I haven't had a chance to focus yet on, on this task, but I'll get to it next week.
Yeah, I get it. I know you're real busy. It's like, wait a minute. Aren't these things these leaders committed to? They're not just things they hope to get done, they're things they committed to. So as the leader, as the facilitator of the weekly accountability meeting, you need to actually hold people accountable and don't accept excuses.
Remember, you get what you tolerate. That was number seven. Number eight is the weekly one-on-one meeting. So the accountability meeting is a meeting of your team. The weekly one-on-one meeting is a one-on-one meeting separately with each of your direct reports. I like to make those 30 minute meetings and in the weekly one-on-one meeting in my framework.
Actually every other, one-on-one meeting is about accountability because in my one-on-one meeting framework, there are two types of one-on-ones that you alternate weekly between the two types. The first is the accountability and feedback meeting. Obviously that one's about accountability, so in the accountability and feedback meeting.
If I'm the leader and you report to me, that's my agenda and my purpose is coming in to that meeting, and I'm gonna hold you accountable over and above what we may have talked about in the weekly accountability meeting or maybe diving deeper on some things that I need to talk to you about that weren't appropriate.
For the Team Weekly accountability meeting, I'm gonna hold you accountable to the tasks you committed to the KPIs you're committed to the rocks you are committed to. I'm also gonna give you feedback, feed feedback on where you're kicking butt, and doing great feedback on where I see a problem, including feedback on those behavioral KPIs or culture fit or core values.
So in the feedback and accountability meeting, that's what you're doing. Now, the other type of meeting, I said there's two types of meeting meetings. the every other week, one-on-one meeting, I call a coaching meeting. And that's not really about accountability In a coaching meeting, if I'm the leader in you work for me.
That's your agenda and you are coming into that meeting. With something you need help with and I'm gonna coach you through it. that's all I'll say there. 'cause our focus here is not about coaching, it's about accountability. So number eight is having the right weekly, one-on-one meeting structure, including a feedback and accountability meeting.
Number nine. Is something called cascading communication, and I think I learned this from one of the Patrick Lencioni books. It may have been five Dysfunctions of a Team, but in these meetings, whether it's quarterly meeting or a weekly meeting, or, actually, one of the things I didn't talk about is a monthly meeting, but quarterly meeting, you know, annual, quarterly, monthly, you know, weekly one-on-one.
One of the important things at the end of the meeting is to do something called. cascading communication and cascading communication is just a way to confirm the decisions that you made and the actions that you agreed to take from that meeting, as well as the reason it's called cascading, as well as from what you talked about, what should be communicated down and out or up through the organization and what.
Needs to stay in that room. Where is it? Vegas rules where, Hey, let's make sure we agree. What we talked about in this meeting does not go anywhere. That's between us. So it's really important at the end of the meeting for this cascading communication, here are the decisions we made. Here's the accountabilities people took, here's what we're communicating out, here's what we're not communicating out.
That's number nine, number 10 of 11. So we're, we're almost there. Number 10 is to have a planning tool to help you document all of these decisions and accountabilities and KPIs and tasks and priorities and projects. You need a planning tool. So you're not saying, let's go back and look at the old flip chart, or do you have the notes from the meeting that we had?
I happen to use something called metronome Growth Systems. That works really well, and it's really consistent with the coaching process I use with my clients and allows us to put in our long-term vision, our three year, uh, initiatives, our annual priorities, our quarterly rocks, who's accountable KPIs, who, what, whens, all of those things go into the tool so that when we have our weekly meetings, our monthly meetings, our quarterly meetings, our annual meetings.
We can, we actually know how we're doing. If you're keeping that tool up to date with your status, we know whether you are red, yellow, green on your KPIs or on your rocks, or whether you got a who, what, when done or not. So having a planning tool, a good planning tool, allows you to manage. By exception. Now some people do that by creating, you know, elaborate, you know, Google Sheet or, or or Excel spreadsheets that they do it on.
Those are okay. Uh, those could work. but I really like the idea of having a good solid planning tool. I use metronome Growth Systems. It's not the only one, but it works for me.
Lastly, number 11, and this is probably the most important one, and I mentioned it earlier, number 11, technique to improve accountability is to model accountability yourself.
If you want your team to be accountable, you need to to model it, you need to set the standard. You need to honor your commitments own when you slip. Being accountable doesn't mean you always get done what you say you're gonna get done, but it means you are taking accountability for it. It means if you are slipping, you are asking for help.
If you've already slipped, you're owning where you slipped, and again asking for help. You are admitting where you need help. You are admitting where you screwed up. And you're doing everything you can to do what you've committed to do, and you need to encourage your people to do the same. If you are not encouraging an open, honest environment where people could admit where they need help, you're gonna have accountability problems, but you need to model that.
So real quickly, that was 11. Number one was KPI accountability. Number two was behavioral accountability. Number three was functional accountability. Number four is project or priority accountability. Number five, task accountability. Number six was make sure you're having a quarterly planning meeting.
Number seven. Is the weekly accountability meeting, not a weekly status meeting, a weekly accountability meeting. Number eight is the weekly one-on-one meeting structure, and especially the feedback and accountability part of that structure. Number nine was cascading communication. Number 10 was using a planning tool.
Number 11 was modeling accountability.
Try one of those. At the very least, pick one that maybe you are not executing on or one where maybe you need to execute better on. Maybe it's starting with creating a, a who, what, when, because you don't have that. Maybe it's a better structure to your one-on-one meetings.
Maybe it's stopping the idea of a weekly status meeting and turning it into a weekly accountability meeting. Do something. Do something and I'd love for you to try it. Share your stories with me. My email is mike@mike-goldman.com. I'd love to hear what's working for you, what's not working for you. Now,
This is not the only place that I've ever talked about accountability. Check out other podcast episodes where I talk about accountability, where I talk about KPIs, where I talk about core values, where I talk about the right planning and communication rhythm. There's bits and pieces of a lot of this in other podcast, my books.
breakthrough Leadership Team. Go buy that book. It talks a lot about all of these things. My upcoming book, I say upcoming depending on when you're listening to this. Uh, my book, the Strength of Talent, how to Grow Your People To Grow Your Profit is coming out the week of October 14th, 2025. So, uh, maybe that's already out there.
Maybe it's not. if you want to. Pre-order it. If it's before then go to go to strengthoftalent.com and, and pre-order it, check out my breakthrough growth course that's under resources on my, my website. There are a lot of different resources I have that will help you with accountability. I hope this was helpful.
I always say if you want a great company, you need a great leadership team. I hope I got you a bit closer there today. Thanks everybody. Talk to you soon.