High Accountability

I've been facilitating CEO/founder 360 feedbacks and noticed a recurring theme: most leaders and organizations grapple with accountability. It's a well-known concept, yet creating a high-accountability culture is hard.

Everyone knows—intellectually—how important accountability is. Of course you’re supposed to keep people accountable. I believe most people are delusional here. Having a high-accountability culture is really hard. Here are some of my best guesses why:

1. Most companies do not clearly define what success in the role looks like.

2. Most companies forget that it’s difficult for managers, as human beings, to hold people accountable.

As a result of this, it’s easy to overestimate how much accountability your company really has. There’s good news though: the Talgo approach to hiring has some beneficial “side effects” when it comes to increasing accountability:

1. You define each key role in terms of outcomes, which inserts the baseline against which you can hold people accountable; and

2. You start hiring almost entirely high performers, who you (correctly) believe are capable of meeting the high standards that you will now hold them to. This removes a key source of subconscious resistance, since the new default expectation is that most people will be hitting their targets. (Relatedly: high performers generally love high-accountability cultures provided they agree with the targets that have been set.)

In other words, by following the Talgo approach to hiring, you create the baseline conditions for having real accountability in your organization and simultaneously start hiring the type of people who will reduce this otherwise burdensome drag on the organization.

I’ve previously underestimated just how powerful this is for the exact same reasons that the accountability issue is so widespread:

1. We all tend to overestimate how clearly defined roles and expectations are (and therefore assume that people definitely know what is expected of them.) They reason that because they know what is expected in that role that everyone else is on the same page as them. (Almost always wrong.)

2. We downplay just how emotionally difficult it is to hold people accountable—even if our own direct personal experience is one in which we have continued to suffer mediocre performers on our teams. (This is very common.) Humans generally take the path of least resistance and it is extremely easy to put off having an emotionally difficult conversation—especially when you don’t have a culture and process that supports having those conversations.

There is a third reason that specifically applies when hiring managers:

3. People underestimate how important active talent management is for the success of a manager. As a result, many interviews barely cover this aspect of the role when it should actually be one of the key criteria for anyone with hire/fire authority. (Someone can have a long list of positive attributes but if they have a demonstrated history of suffering poor performers on their teams, this is a serious red flag in your attempt to build a high-performing org.)

TLDR: Accountability sounds great, but is hard, and pretty much everyone struggles with it. Baking outcomes into the role definition therefore has spillover effects beyond just the “hiring” domain—it has the potential to truly transform your organization.