A couple of weeks ago, Patrick Jessee and I had an opportunity to address a group of bright young leaders through the IU Kelley School of Business executive certificate program. (A quick and shameless shout-out to the IU Kelley School of Business and Barb Cutillo for creating the opportunity to share insights.)
And as I reflect on that experience, I find myself wanting to share more broadly why we believe there is an accountability gap in our operational worlds. By this, I mean, why leaders and business owners routinely struggle to enjoy group accountability, versus all key decisions and problems landing at their doorstep.
The Universal Desire to Contribute and the Accountability Gap
We typically meet our clients at various stages of the business lifecycle. It’s either “I’m growing so quickly that things are flying apart and it’s chaos”, or “uh oh, something changed in my business and I don’t know how to get it back on track.” In both of those instances, CEOs and business owners describe the common experience of being blindsided by problems or customer complaints, leading to the question: “How can I get my people to be more accountable?”
The inherent human desire to contribute: 98% of people want to contribute and be part of a winning team.
The alarming reality of engagement (Gallup 2025 study) is that in 2024, engagement dropped from 23% to 21%, and the cost to the world economy is over $400 billion. What might be more alarming is that it was only 23% in the first place! So, why is it that 98% of the workforce wants to contribute and engage, and yet only 21% are?
People seek deep connection to humanity and purpose, not just tasks. Accountability is empowered, not driven. It comes from openly sharing business objectives, allowing people to influence those objectives, and collaboratively focusing on daily actions we need to take to win the day.
Reason One: The Foundation – Communicating Business Objectives
You haven’t communicated the business objectives. The vast majority of workers out there are unsure of organizational goals. People struggle with accountability when desired results are unknown, and it cannot be just “focus on what I tell you.” There is an important motive for people, and that is having agency and visibility into what is more largely is to be achieved.
The Solution: Four Steps for Communicating Most Important Objectives.
1. Know Your Expectations.
Leaders must be clear on business objectives first! Be extremely clear and intentional about what is to be accomplished. Don’t be wishy-washy or communicate via word salad. A wise sales teacher once said to me that confused people can’t say yes in your sales pitch. It’s not much different than what you’re doing to your team when you’re not specific, tangible, and clear.
Examples of this are: what do you want to achieve in terms of revenue, profitability, cash,….or a strategic market. The key point is to decide what the business needs to do and communicate it. Then, seek out where they did not get it and put the effort into helping them connect the dots to their contribution.
2. Keep it to the Vital Few (80/20 Rule).
Have you ever heard of the Pareto Principle, that 80% of outcomes result from 20% of causes?
Identify the “vital few” initiatives that really matter to your business. Who are the 20% of your customers driving 80% of profits or new business? What 20% of your employees’ efforts are driving 80% of productivity? What one problem must we solve really well for our customers?
Avoid over-complicating things or confusing the team by constantly changing your objectives. Focus on the vital few. New ideas are good, but vet them thoroughly before you introduce them to the broader organization. In some ways, curb your enthusiasm and allow it to come out constructively and match pace with the team‘s ability to make adjustments.
A quick side bar: I was helping a company that was developing very hard measurement technology. The team was generally good at it and loved the new frontier of all the new applications that could use this technology. The company was only about 85 employees and had fewer than 10 engineers. “In development“ they were trying to take on 70 or more projects of disparate nature and varying degrees of difficulty. I won’t bore you with all the details, but the bottom line is that they were deluding their resources in mastering nothing. We narrowed the company’s focus to two market segments where we had definable value to bring to the customers and the juice was worth the squeeze. By narrowing our efforts to the focused few, customers understood what we were “known for” in our expertise, and we tripled the company’s value.
3. Make Sure Leaders Are Aligned.
Command and control leadership style has an alternative. In fact, generally speaking, command and control is only useful when something is an emergency or must be executed very precisely. Otherwise, include your senior leadership and team in any decision where you want them to take responsibility and be accountable. Don’t dictate. Constructive debate is usually necessary to achieve commitment to results. Embrace vulnerability, gather leaders, be real about direction, and by no means, do not accept lip service for the important feedback in return. The importance of leadership modeling commitment is essential. Remember, what you do every day is saying what is OK in your environment…. whatever it is!
4. Beat the Drum.
Communication is not a one-time event; the “Rule of 7” applies. In case you don’t know what the Rule of 7 is, it simply is that you’re going to need to repeat seven times what you want to get across to the team in order for them to understand and act on your expectations. Regular reiteration is crucial, like watering a garden. Sometimes we like to call it the mundanities of operational excellence. We like the use of systematically embedding communication within every team every day. (For those who are interested, we do teach a model that is easily accessible for small and midsize businesses.)
Reason Two: The Compass – Moving Beyond Lagging Indicators
Your business has an incomplete set of performance indicators. Doing the job means achieving results, not just finishing tasks. Measurement is key, but often misunderstood.
The Solution: Leveraging Leading Indicators.
1. Confirm KPIs for Vital Few Objectives.
Avoid measuring for measurement’s sake, tracking useless KPIs, or worse monitoring too many indicators. What matters to the business must be tracked to be improved.
2. Standard KPIs are Rear-View Mirrors.
Lagging indicators show past performance and businesses feel powerless to impact quarterly KPIs, because they are outputs of past processes and events. Yes, we need visibility into trends, but also of our daily current positioning.
3. Make the KPIs Leading Indicators.
Identify leading indicators; they will be predictive in nature and allow you to solve problems while they are small. But how do we do this?
Sit with the KPI owner in your business, identify contributing teams, drill down to influences and team impact. Leading indicators should be simple in nature and tell the story of where you veered.
4. Best Place to Find the Leading Indicators.
Look at processes and go upstream to the very first step, project plans when laid out and documented make it easy to pick up on dependencies, and inter-team hand-offs are frequently a source of breaking point or downstream failures. A key principle in all of this: the process is usually where a root cause lives, the result is just the symptom.
Reason Three: The Empowerment – Daily Problem-Solving and Decision-Making
Your employees aren’t empowered to solve problems and make decisions. Providing measurement isn’t enough; people need a construct to action insight.
The Solution: Check in Daily
1. Carve out 15 minutes a day to review leading indicators with your team, or better, all teams.
Daily cadence for communication of objectives and actioning leading indicators is invaluable for maintaining alignment toward shared objectives. There is so much noise in our world both on and off the job that we should never assume things haven’t veered.
2. Make it Visual.
Like a scoreboard, visual boards provide real-time, easy-to-understand feedback. The human brain processes visuals faster than text. This also enables common understanding and efficient problem identification. Even better, they will proactively suggest corrective action. The bonus for executives…..a quick status check by glancing at boards.
3. Give them a Script.
A prescribed script empowers capacity for decisive action. It also prevents huddles from degenerating into decision-less narrative. We suggest the following script: take attendance; review each leading indicator; if good, move on; if not, record root cause; decide what can be done (for corrective action, with owner, deadline, and status). If they get stuck, instruct them to escalate only these items. Otherwise, give them explicit permission to solve the problem on their own and serve the business objective.
4. Create New “Muscle Memory”.
Leaders should attend these huddles from time to time (not always), listen, and provide feedback. Ask about tripping points, frequent root causes, and allow them to act independently. Encourage it.
Reason Four: The Synergy – Connecting Teams for Collective Impact
Your teams are blind to how they impact each other.
“Whitewater” results from misalignment. You know the condition where everyone is splashing and not getting anywhere.
The Solution: “Connective Tissue” Between Teams.
1. Provide a Safe and Objective Inter-Team Communication Path.
Common daily huddle cadence creates standard approach. Simply add an “escalation path” for ideas/issues larger than than the team itself. Write it down, what should be escalated and what should not. Be explicit.
2. Attack Issues, Not People.
Continuous improvement results from relentless attention to issues, identifying the root causes of those issues, and making small adjustments. And, steady pressure on it eventually results in a competitive advantage. This is when your company starts to easily win… because the scales have tipped in your favor.
3. Focus on the Hand-Off, and Study It!
Leading indicators can measure anything, including inter-team hand-offs, which is probably one of the best sources of leading indicators of whether you will actually win the day.
Making Accountability Accessible and Sustainable
Accountability is empowered, not driven. It’s not a stick or always looking over someone’s shoulder. Rather, it is the establishment of trust that results when you share the business objectives in a way that they understand and can impact. This will be different for each team within your organization. Taking the time to translate that for all groups within your company means fewer quality escapes and reduced service failures. It also means winning the referral and achieving your targeted outcomes.
Leverage the Enable Management System.
What you just read is affordable and accessible. Contact us today at contact@enablesolutions.us, whether you would like direct help or simply have a question about what we meant in the above. Our business objective at Enable is to teach the leaders we want in the future, leaders who bring out the good in the team they already have.