Organizational Growing Pains | Positivist Group
It’s a frustration I hear from leaders fairly regularly: “My team needs to take more accountability.”
Sometimes it comes up in conversations about performance, sometimes it’s about delegation or workload, and sometimes it’s simply the growing frustration that seemingly every decision still needs the leader’s involvement.
And to be fair, there are certainly situations where individual accountability is the problem. But before arriving at that conclusion, I think there’s value in exploring what we actually mean by accountability, and whether everyone involved understands it the same way.
Accountability can mean taking ownership of results, following through on commitments, exercising independent judgment, communicating proactively, or meeting someone else’s expectations. While these concepts are related, they’re not interchangeable.
When a leader tells me their employees aren’t accountable, my first instinct is to understand what that looks like in practice.
Walk me through a typical day.
One of my favourite ways to explore organizational challenges is to ask someone to walk me through a typical day. Where does their time go? What decisions land on their desk? When do things slow down, or become frustrating?
And when they describe a particular situation, I’ll often ask, “So what did you do then?”
It’s a simple question, but it can reveal quite a lot.
A leader might explain that employees continually come to them for answers rather than working things out themselves. As we explore specific examples, however, we sometimes discover that the leader routinely provides those answers, even when the employees are perfectly capable of making the decisions independently.
Or perhaps they’ve delegated responsibility for a project but continue to make every meaningful decision along the way. Sometimes, particularly when things are busy, they’ve simply taken the work back because it was faster to do it themselves.
None of this is particularly unusual, and I don’t think it necessarily reflects poor leadership. Most leaders are trying to be helpful, remove obstacles and keep things moving. The challenge is that our everyday behaviour doesn’t always reinforce the expectations we believe we’re communicating.
I’ll often reflect what I’ve heard back to the leader, partly to confirm that I’ve understood correctly and partly to give them an opportunity to hear their own patterns described from another perspective.
Sometimes they’ll immediately recognize the inconsistency. Other times they’ll qualify what they’ve said: “Well, it’s not always like that,” or “It depends on the person.”
And they’re probably right.
Most organizational dynamics are considerably more complicated than they first appear. So we keep exploring, looking at the circumstances, the people involved and the decisions being made. Eventually, a more complete picture begins to emerge, and that’s when the real work can begin.
When being helpful becomes a habit
Think about what happens when an employee encounters a difficult decision. They ask their manager for guidance, the manager provides an answer, and the problem is resolved. It’s a perfectly reasonable interaction, particularly if the employee is inexperienced or the decision carries significant consequences.
But imagine that same interaction repeated dozens of times over several months.
The employee becomes accustomed to seeking direction, and the manager becomes accustomed to providing it. Both develop a predictable way of working that feels efficient and appropriate, until one day the manager begins wondering why nobody makes decisions independently.
Meanwhile, the employee may genuinely believe that checking with the manager is exactly what’s expected.
Neither person necessarily recognizes the pattern they’ve established together.
This is one of the reasons I think accountability deserves a more thoughtful conversation than simply asking people to take greater ownership of their work. Sometimes what appears to be a lack of accountability is actually a pattern of dependency that has developed gradually, often with the best of intentions.
That doesn’t mean employees have no responsibility for exercising initiative or developing their judgment. It does mean we need to understand the environment in which we’re asking them to do so.
Delegation is more than assigning work
I think we sometimes approach delegation as though it’s a transaction: I assign something, you complete it, and we move on.
In reality, effective delegation is also an ongoing process of developing people’s capability and independence.
There will be times when employees need fairly close direction, particularly when they’re learning a new skill or navigating unfamiliar circumstances. At other times, they might need someone to test their thinking with, or reassurance that they’re approaching a situation appropriately.
As their confidence and competence develop, they should progressively be able to make more decisions without involving their manager at all.
I sometimes think of leadership in this context as a form of triage. A leader needs to understand what’s happening across the organization, recognize when intervention is necessary, and know when people are perfectly capable of navigating independently.
The objective isn’t to come to everyone’s rescue, but to establish the conditions that allow everyone to do their jobs effectively and safely.
Of course, this requires leaders to be deliberate about how they develop their teams. Independence doesn’t happen simply because we’ve told someone to be more independent. People need opportunities to practise judgment, make decisions, receive feedback and learn from experience.
And leaders need to be reasonably consistent in how they respond.
If we encourage independent decision-making one day but override decisions without explanation the next, we create uncertainty about what independence actually looks like. Employees may reasonably conclude that the safest approach is to seek approval, even when they’ve been told they have authority to proceed.
Before we address accountability, let’s understand the conditions.
When organizations identify accountability as a concern, the temptation can be to introduce clearer performance expectations, more frequent reporting, or additional oversight. These may be appropriate interventions, but they aren’t necessarily the right starting point.
I’d first want to understand a few things:
- Clarity: Do people understand their responsibilities, their authority, and what successful performance looks like?
- Capability: Do they have the knowledge, skills and resources to meet expectations?
- Consistency: Are leaders reinforcing those expectations through their everyday decisions and behaviour?
- Autonomy: Do employees have genuine permission to exercise judgment, including reasonable room to make mistakes and learn?
- Follow-through: When commitments aren’t met, are they discussed constructively and addressed appropriately?
Importantly, I’d also want to hear from the employees themselves. Their experience of the situation may be quite different from the leader’s, and understanding those differences can tell us a great deal about where the actual friction exists.
In some organizations, we discover that responsibilities have become unclear as the business has grown. In others, people have become so accustomed to informal ways of working that nobody is entirely certain where decision-making authority sits.
Sometimes there are genuine capability gaps, competing priorities or performance issues that need attention. And sometimes the leader has become a bottleneck without realizing it.
The point isn’t that every accountability problem is secretly a leadership problem. It’s that we can’t confidently choose an intervention until we understand what’s contributing to the situation.
Accountability is a shared responsibility.
Leaders have a responsibility to establish clear expectations, provide appropriate support, develop capability and create an environment where employees can exercise judgment.
Employees, in turn, have a responsibility to understand their commitments, take ownership of their work, communicate challenges and follow through.
I don’t see these responsibilities as competing with one another. They’re interdependent, and both need attention if we want to create a genuinely accountable organization.
Sometimes the work involves developing a leader’s delegation practices. Sometimes it means clarifying roles, revisiting decision-making authority, or supporting employees to build new capabilities. And sometimes it requires having a difficult but necessary conversation about individual performance.
What matters is that we’re responding to what is actually happening rather than what we’ve assumed is happening.
The next time you find yourself frustrated that someone has brought you a decision they could reasonably have made independently, it may be worth asking yourself:
“What have I done, intentionally or unintentionally, to teach them that this decision belongs to me?”
You may discover that you’ve done everything reasonably possible to establish clear expectations and develop independence, in which case a different conversation is needed. But you may also find an opportunity to change a pattern that has developed gradually over time.
And sometimes, that small shift in awareness is where meaningful organizational change begins.
A conversation worth having
If accountability has become a recurring frustration in your organization, perhaps it’s time to look beyond who’s responsible and explore how responsibilities, expectations and everyday leadership habits are shaping the way your team works.
At Positivist Group, we help organizations untangle these kinds of challenges, often starting with a few good questions. If this sounds familiar, we’d welcome the conversation.
Stay curious. Grow with intention.
Erin Patchell
Principal and Senior Advisor | Positivist Group
