Fear Isn't Accountability: How to Lead With Trust

Transcript

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As leaders, sometimes you come down on somebody and you get tough with someone on a problem that you helped create, and people stop bringing you more problems, and you think that you solved the issue. You think that things are getting better, but what you’ve really done is just keep the mistakes from coming to you. You’ve created a whole bunch of silence. So getting tough, being a tough leader, a tough manager, can result in skipping the real conversation that needs to be had on the front end. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today: getting tough won’t teach accountability.

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What does getting tough mean, Junior?

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We’re going to be tough on accountability, but we’ve got to break that down. If you’re pushing the fear button, if that’s what getting tough means, and you’ve moved from the problem to the person, and so maybe you’re attacking the person, you’re creating fear, you’re inducing fear.

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Ooh, you’ve just set in motion a train of unintended consequences, and they’re going to bite you. So as you said, what happens to mistakes after that? Well, they go underground. You’re not going to hear about those. Most of those people are not going to tell you the truth. The feedback you get gets filtered, or it doesn’t come your way at all. It gets redirected. All kinds of things happen. You may suffer from the consequences of willful blindness. Now you’re more isolated and more insulated than you ever were. So let’s reverse engineer getting tough a little bit.

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Yeah. Well, and on the flip side of that, you have leaders being lax. They give people a pass, and it’s not getting tough, but there’s zero accountability at all. It’s complete laissez-faire, and people are just operating on whims and moving forward with no repercussions for bad actions. There’s no clarity or expectation setting. And so you have that type of anarchy on the one hand because there’s no intervention from a leader, and on the opposite side you also have silence because you’ve punished it out of the environment through fear. So we have to figure out what true accountability looks like. What does healthy coaching look like? Expectation setting. Because if you look just at the result, an outcome, as a leader, and you move right to repercussions or consequence because it’s not the outcome you wanted, well, we have to look way upstream at all of the stuff that happened to get to that point. Were the appropriate expectations set? What was the person’s understanding of the goal, what we were trying to accomplish, so on and so forth.

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So the first thing to do is to look in the mirror and analyze how well you did in setting clear expectations from the beginning, coaching the person along the way, intervening at the earliest sign that performance was starting to flag. So you begin with yourself.

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Yeah. And we’re going to get into a whole bunch of the tips and what we would prescribe to you as a leader or as a leader of leaders to help people get better in this regard, because we need to fall somewhere on the spectrum in between teaching people to hide through fear or holding people accountable without giving them a pass. We need to be somewhere in there.

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And in all of this, Junior, don’t we need to acknowledge that doing accountability well, holding people accountable in an effective way, is one of the absolute most difficult things in leadership?

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Well, there’s a recent Gallup poll from March of ‘26. Gallup looked at seven leadership competencies, and creating accountability came last. So of the seven competencies that they looked at, accountability was the lowest rated. Here’s what people said. Fewer than half of leaders rated themselves outstanding or exceptional at it. And yet it’s a skill that we expect leaders to have. We also don’t expect that there needs to be a whole bunch of training happening to get people up to speed on how to do accountability.

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Well, that’s an interesting point. We often assume that people know how to do this as soon as we promote them into a people manager role.

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Of course. There’s an absolute dearth of skill in accountability and holding people accountable. And yet there’s this really conspicuous absence. And so what does that mean? Well, it means that there’s a whole bunch of work to do, and that we as leaders of leaders need to help them along the path to figuring out how to do accountability well, because it is an art form. It’s not something that you stumble into. And I would go so far as to say that there’s not huge variance either in people’s ability to do this well by default.

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Which is a really good point, and that is that whoever you are, you can get better at this.

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Yeah. This is not some inherited trait. This is not a talent. This is not part of your DNA that you can’t change. This is definitely a learnable skill.

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So let’s talk a little bit more about the nature of the problem. We talked about this up front. You can punish your way out of getting information. So we talk about psychological safety and rewarded and punished vulnerability. The fundamental mechanism here is that if we punish acts of vulnerability, a question that someone asks, a point of view that they share, then eventually that information is going to stop coming to us. People go on the defensive. They’re going to talk less. They’re going to put fewer things on the table. And so you can get someone to admit to a mistake by backing them into a corner and giving them no place to go if you have the data, right? But what have you taught them about coming back to you next time? They’re not going to do it. So there’s a longer game to be played. And as leaders, we have to understand all of the chess. We have to understand three moves away and where we need to get somebody, not get them in terms of repercussions, but where we need to move them along the path to bringing us information.

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And where we do want to get them is a place where they raise their hand when there’s a mistake, when there’s an error, when there’s a performance gap. We want them to voluntarily say, “Hey, that’s me,” and take responsibility, take ownership. So we want proactive accountability on their part.

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We want them to push instead of us pulling.

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And then the problem on the other side is of a different nature. You don’t want to damage the relationship with somebody, and so you let the thing go. This happens all the time in management. You’re trying to preserve the relationship with the person, and so you just abdicate your role inside accountability and say it’s okay, either I’ll pick up the slack or the team will pick it up.

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Yeah, we have names for that.

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The person isn’t going to have to deal with that repercussion, and then the rest of the team starts to key on that. And that’s something that I would point out: every time you make a decision like this as a leader, whether to come down hard on somebody or to give them a pass, it’s not just that situation that you’re affecting. You’re setting a precedent for that person, but also for the team at large. If you let something go, the team starts to learn something about your boundaries. What are the bounds of performance? Well, evidently there’s a hole in the fence over here. And so they start to learn that.

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And that’s a bad thing for a team to start to learn about the pathology of your ability to hold people accountable, or your lack thereof.

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The third piece of the problem that we want to point out is that it’s really easy to swing from buddy to micromanager. So we’ll talk about the four quadrants of relationship and accountability, which we’ve mentioned in previous episodes. But the pathological zones we call buddy and micromanager. Buddy is we give you a pass. Micromanager is we’re coming down really hard. So if you’re that buddy profile and you hear a conversation like this, you might be inclined to go pull out the hammer and start swinging it and saying, “I’m going to come down on people and I’m going to get tough, and I know that I’ve been lackadaisical and I’m going to get on the ball.” If you swing to the other side, then you get frustrated. You start coming down on people, and you still haven’t learned how to hold someone accountable while keeping a strong relationship. And that’s the narrow middle that we need to be able to find as leaders: maintain a strong relationship with somebody while holding them accountable. It’s elusive.

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It is elusive. Do you know why I think it’s so elusive, Junior? There’s more than one reason, but one big reason is that the relationship that you have should be able to withstand accountability if it is a true, honest, genuine, meaningful relationship. If you don’t have that, then you don’t have a foundation, part of that foundation, for accountability. And so you would need to go cultivate and nurture that relationship. If it’s a superficial relationship, if the person you’re trying to hold accountable doesn’t know for sure that you really are genuinely interested in their personal and professional life, that you care about them, that you care about their growth and development, then you’re in a deficit position, and you’ve got to go build that. So there’s no shortcut if a good relationship is not there, if you haven’t put that in place.

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We talk about surface acting, that term from Arlie Hochschild at Berkeley, where we’re being nice, we’re being cordial, we’re being amiable, we’re professionally warm in a sense, but it’s still superficial. That’s different. We’re talking about cultivating a relationship that’s real, where you know that my intent is to help you, that I really care, and I’m trying to help you for the long term to grow professionally, to be successful, to be able to perform. I’m trying to set you up for success. That’s got to be in place. So if you swing over and you overcompensate and you go to micromanaging and the relationship’s not there, that’s not going to work.

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So you can see that there’s some foundational work that you need to do.

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There’s a lot, and each of us needs to do it. There’s progress to be made.

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So let’s talk about the two axes in this two-by-two that we like to share when we’re training accountability with leaders. Those two axes are relationship and accountability, as we’ve been talking about. Relationship, and accountability is our ability to hold people accountable. That can be low and that can be high. So the low-low combination, low relationship and low accountability, we call absentee landlord, and many of us have probably had bosses of this nature. You’re not close to the person and you don’t follow through. So there is no relationship and there is no accountability. You’re just not there. Then we have buddy: high relationship, low accountability. You care about the person, but you’re the one who’s going to give them a pass. Then we have micromanager: low relationship, high accountability. You hold them accountable without doing much at all to build the relationship. It’s just pure accountability. Then you have the coaching box, which is our aspiration. That’s high and to the right. High relationship, high accountability. You have a strong relationship. You also set clear expectations and you follow through. So the relationship without the accountability is the pass. And the accountability without the relationship is a short leash, as you like to say.

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So if you think about the last hard conversation that you had with somebody as a leader, as a manager, which direction did you come from? Did it feel like it was pure relationship? Did it feel like it was pure accountability? Were you able to hit the strike zone and balance both things? Because each of us has tendencies. You might not be squarely in the buddy box or squarely in the micromanager box, but you might have some tendencies that pull you one direction or the other. We all do.

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I think we all have tendencies that go back to either absentee landlord, micromanager, or buddy. Those three pathologies. I’ve said it before. I don’t think people are born in the coaching box. I think they have to learn their way there, grow their way there, practice their way there.

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So let’s get into some tips, some practical things that we can do to get better. First is go back to the expectation. So let’s say that we’re looking at a result that we didn’t love so much. The first thing that I will do as a leader is not examine the result itself, nor how I feel about it, nor what’s going to happen to the person because of it. We’re going to go back to the expectations that were set up front. And this is where you can save yourself a lot of headache. I’ve made this mistake many times, where I focus on the outcome. And I’ve learned over time that you first start that conversation with some questions. Because what will happen if you do this well is that the person will hold themselves accountable. That’s the ultimate goal and what I strive for, because I learned that I don’t like coming down on people either. That’s not a fun thing to do. And so if you can get them to a point where they will take accountability for themselves, then you save yourself the pain of coming down hard on somebody, you save them the pain and embarrassment of that happening, and you transfer the ownership of the problem to that person.

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So let me give you an example. “What were your expectations when we started out on this workstream?” And then you let the person talk. “Well, I thought that we were going to do this and this and this.” Two things must be true. Either the expectations align with yours, in which case there’s dissonance, and you can see the outcome, and they’re communicating the expectations. So they can see it. They’re telling you. Or the expectations were not the same. Your set was different. And that provides the opportunity to say, “Oh, well, it looks like our expectations were different. Here’s how I was thinking about that.” And guess where the problem lives most of the time. That’s a you problem at that point. If the expectations up front weren’t clear, then the onus is on you as a leader to set appropriate expectations.

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So if the expectations are there, they’re clear, they’re documented, then there’s nowhere for the person to go, and it’s immediately and painfully obvious. If you come down hard right out of the gate, then they can move into expectation dissonance and start to ameliorate the problem by saying, “Well, that’s just not what we even talked about.” And now you find yourself in an argument.

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So the first gate, Junior, is expectations: clear or not clear.

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That’s it. Start there. As you say, don’t talk about the results. Don’t talk about the poor performance. You don’t need to go there yet. And then: “What did you understand about what our objective was? What changed in your work along the way?” So as you were doing it, let’s say that we didn’t arrive. What changed? Was there an environmental variable that I don’t know about that’s neither of our faults? Maybe there is, in which case I should know about it before I just crack down. Or maybe something shifted in resource or time, something else changed, priority. Who knows? So if you walk through that with the person and you’re just asking questions, then you both are seeing the answers in real time and you’re walking through them. “Okay, well, we were clear on expectations. Nothing in the environment changed.” You can see how it becomes obvious to both people in the conversation what has happened.

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And so, Junior, as you’re going through this process, you’re coaching the person through questions. You’re not giving them declarations. You’re not coming down on them. You are, through inquiry, drawing them out. You’re helping them explain what happened, what their understanding was, and then you can assess based on that.

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Totally. And here’s another tool of the trade. Instead of saying, “You should have had this thing done on time,” the person’s just going to get defensive. Flip that and say, “Is it unreasonable for me to expect that this be done on time?”

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That’s a very nice question. What’s that person going to say?

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Well, if they say it’s unreasonable, great. Now we get to have a conversation about the reasonability of the situation. If they say, which almost ten times out of ten they will, that it’s reasonable, especially if they participated on the front end of laying it out, then we say, “Okay, then where do you think we should go from here?” And again, let the person do this. The person’s probably going to give themselves their own consequence, their own repercussion. Another way to do this: “Well, as you can see, we’re in this situation. What would you do next if you were me?” Now the person has to put themselves in your shoes and coach themselves. And so if they say, “Well, yeah, this is tough. I don’t think I met the criteria. I don’t think that I deserve the bonus.” They’re doing that for themselves.

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But what I noticed, Junior, is that through the process, you’re transferring the accountability back to them, the ownership back to them, and you’re also having them do the thinking.

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Yeah. And that’s the next point: let the person do some thinking. So tip one, go back to the expectations that were set. Tip two is let the person do some thinking. Don’t jump in and start explaining things. Don’t start giving consequences and repercussions. Let them work through it. The only reason that we’ve come to these tips and tricks is because we’ve done the wrong thing so many times. At least that’s true for me. So, “Okay, what happened? What would you do differently next time?” And let the person work all the way through that. If you take the problem and you solve it yourself and you say, “Well, here’s exactly what has to be different next time,” now you are absorbing responsibility for the critical thinking. You’re transferring none of that. And you are denying them the opportunity to make progress. So are they going to come out of that conversation feeling like there’s a path forward that they can commit to? It’s unlikely if you’re the one who created it and just handed it to them on a platter. You have to let them co-create.

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Isn’t it interesting that when we have these accountability conversations, so often the person that has not performed, we turn them into a passive observer. In this conversation, we’re so directive. We turn them into a passive observer instead of an active participant who’s actually doing most of the work, taking the ownership, doing the critical thinking. We do the opposite. That’s ironic. And what are we trying to do? We’re trying to help them become more accountable.

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Well, think about why that’s our tendency. Why is that our knee-jerk reaction? Because that’s the way we’ve been socialized as leaders. And not just as leaders, but as humans. If we’re going to go have a conversation like that, we have to have the answer. We’re going to administer the consequences. We’re going to really take charge of the situation. And what I found to be most effective over time is that it’s precisely the opposite. The person has the answers. They’re not ignorant to their non-performance. They know perfectly well. And so if I think about anyone I’ve ever had to let go, I’ve learned how to get that person to do it themselves. I don’t want to come in and say, “This is exactly what’s happened and this is the prescription.” No. “What would you do if you were in my situation? I have an obligation to the rest of the team in this regard. How do you think the team perceives this situation?”

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Yeah. Well, it’s possible that you get into a situation in which there’s ultimate denial, and you just need to move forward and make a decision and be clear and decisive. But most of the time, if you’re working with relatively reasonable people, you’ll be able to get to a point where they’re doing a lot of this themselves. As we say, Junior, the fundamental assumption of the coaching paradigm is that most of the solutions reside within the person that you’re coaching. They know, as you said. They understand. So you need to be skilled in drawing that out through inquiry, transferring the ownership, transferring the critical thinking. But they know.

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Yeah. And you can cascade that all the way down in a way that it doesn’t seem like it’s your requirement as a person. It’s not that this is Tim’s requirement of me. No, this is what must be true organizationally for us to accomplish our goals. So if you’re trying to coach someone along and there’s a performance issue, or even if it’s aspirational, let’s say that you’re having a really positive conversation with somebody and you’re trying to spur them along in their development, the same thing is true. Say, “Well, what do we hope is true next quarter? Great. What does that mean for you and your role? Where do you think the gap is between where we are today and what would have to be true in order to accomplish that? What role do you see me playing as your manager in helping achieve that?” “Well, this and this and this.” “Great. That seems awesome. I’d be happy to do that.”

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It just strikes me that so often the manager is the bottleneck. The manager is the barrier. The manager is the decelerator to the person’s growth and development and learning how to take on more accountability, based on the way that we’re doing it.

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Yep. Next one is going to be stay involved. What do we mean when we say stay involved? We need to give feedback while there’s still time to use it. So if we see that something’s going away that needs some intervention, let’s not wait. Let’s catch that right in the moment, and again, through inquiry, see if we can intervene in a way that’s useful.

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Junior, we have a phrase for that. The early truth is kind. It’s much more kind than the late truth. The late truth’s not very kind.

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You don’t want to let the problem build, also from an emotional perspective, until you’re finally angry enough to have the conversation. And that’s usually the tipping point: someone will say, “I’ve had it. That’s enough.” And if you’re in that state, that’s not a great emotion to be coaching from. But how irked are you if you catch something when it’s 2% off or 5% off? It’s like, “I didn’t really love that.” That’s an okay place to coach from. I’m in a state that’s going to be more useful to you than if I’m just upset. If the expectations were clear and someone didn’t do what they agreed to do, that is a time for intervention. That is not a time for waiting until it happens again and again and again.

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However, you have to balance that with the repetition of the thing. So if it’s a small thing, what I will often do is let the thing happen three times, if it’s a small thing. So you have to balance that. If you see something that on the severity scale is enough, great, first time, we’ve got to get right on that. If it’s a small thing, maybe three times. Because then the person can’t slough that off quite as much. And it’s like, “Well, instance one, two, three, this is a pattern that I’m seeing. What do you think I should take away from this?” Again, a question. And the person’s going to explain themselves. But if you say, “I saw this thing three times, and this is precisely why I don’t like it, and it must never happen again.” If someone’s not on time: “Hey, how do you think I should feel about the last three times that you’ve been late to our meeting?” They’re going to be like, “Yeah, you’re right.” They’re probably not going to say to you, “Don’t worry about it. It’s fine.”

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Okay. Coaching does include consequences. This is one of the final points that we’ll make. It does include repercussions. It doesn’t mean that we’re just going to sit by the wayside and not intervene, or when we do, it’s not going to be severe. That’s part of your stewardship as a leader. One of the things that’s helped me is when those tough conversations do have to happen and we do have to administer some consequence, then you can use your obligation to the team at large as an effective frame to help do that. This isn’t me coming out of left field, independently telling you that I don’t like how things are going. This is me representing the team at large, the goals, our ambition, our expectations. And it’s that whole amalgamation that is dissatisfied with the way that things are going, because we have to be in a different place.

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So you’ve got to meet the person where they are. You’ve got to help them through it. But if you think about the two axes that we’ve talked about, relationship and accountability, we know we have tendencies, and so we need to figure out what our tendencies are and then work on those. Try to move in the right direction so that we can be high and to the right, high relationship and high accountability. So with those as the axes you keep in your head, it becomes pretty practical. How do you operationalize that and get it into real work? I would say if there’s one thing, it’s inquiry. That helps more than almost anything else. It builds relationship, and it helps with accountability. If you lead with inquiry, people are going to tell you about themselves. You’re going to learn. You’re going to build relationships.

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I think it communicates a lot of respect.

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Totally does. “I want to understand.” And wanting to understand also builds accountability, because they’re going to take charge of their own outcomes. They’re going to help you understand all of the things that preceded the outcome. And you get to be there to just help navigate and quarterback here and there, but you’re not the one going in and turning the screws on every little thing and controlling the environment. You’re going to let the person operate, and you’re going to do that artfully, skillfully, through questions.

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Final thing is that this takes practice. This doesn’t happen overnight. What would you leave people with as things to think about, keep in mind, or practice as they’re trying to become better at holding people accountable?

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Beyond inquiry, Junior, which you highlighted and emphasized, and I totally agree with that, I would just say invest in the relationship. That becomes the foundation. The stronger, the deeper that relationship, the higher the tolerance for candor, and the more accountability you can bring into that relationship.

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Love it. Well, that’s all we have for you today. There will be a downloadable available for you if you want to take some of the synthesis of today’s conversation, print it out, or keep it handy so that you can become a better coach, a better leader, by becoming skillful in the art of accountability. If you liked today’s conversation, please share with a friend, somebody that you think might find it useful. Subscribe if you haven’t already, and we’ll catch you in the next episode.