How I reduced my ownership of team ACCOUNTABILITY from 100% → 40%.

Last Monday, during our weekly planning meeting, my team silently achieved a huge cultural milestone, one that fundamentally transformed how we operate. It’s not a metric that will directly appear in any report, but its impact is enormous.

It’s a key indicator of how well the team performs.

Why does accountability matter?

Without it, OKRs (and strategy, and agile and digital transformation and all visionary changes organisations want to implement) will fail.

• Not because people are lazy.

• Not because of unclear goals.

• Not because of a lack of resources.

They will fail because in a conflict-avoidant workplace obsessed with psychological safety and harmony (rather than trust and excellence), “pointing out when people don’t keep commitments” makes you look like a jerk.

Most employees don’t want to be jerks because, without training, it feels like conflict. Therefore, accountability is 100% the manager’s responsibility by default.

Here’s how I created a system of distributed ownership for accountability that’s reduced my ownership of team accountability by 60% in the last 5 years.

Step 1: Co-define accountability.

For the last 10 years, we have run a team retreat every January/February to review the past year, strategise and plan for the current year, and shape our team culture.

Here’s how we co-defined accountability:

Luckily, we didn’t have to pull this definition from thin air; we just used the definitions from Franklin Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” and “Smart Trust” workshops.

A definition isn’t enough; there can be no doubt in anyone’s mind what good and bad accountability looks like. Here’s an example:

❌ An accountability failure:

Your weekly report isn’t published by 11 am on Monday when the team meets.

✅ Effective accountability:

On Sunday evening, you call the colleague expecting to use your report for a presentation the next day at 1 pm. (so they have time to adapt).

At the core of accountability is commitment.

But what exactly is commitment?

Step 2: Establish a model for clarifying commitments

For daily work, here’s how we defined a commitment.

Our chosen tool for transforming intentions and wishes (e.g. “Create board presentation”) into commitments?

• A clearly written task: [verb] + [subject | object] 

• Add a Definition of Done (DoD) checklist for non-routine tasks

• Add a Due Date (within the next 90 days) for time-sensitive tasks

• Assigned to one person (absolutely no multiple assignees to tasks)

Here’s what such a commitment looks like in our project tool (Jira).

Here’s how we create this DoD checklist

1. I assign a task (1) to the direct employee (during a meeting, through an email, etc)

2. They create the task and DoD checklist (3) in the task management tool and ask me to validate it.

3. Optionally, they can put contextual information (2) that will be useful when they start working on the task.

This process clarifies expectations so we can all avoid the “but I thought that … “ scenario later on.

The DoD checklist also makes accountability conversations more objective (and less confrontational), making it easy for anyone on the team to hold anyone else accountable.

Step 3: One source of truth for all commitments

A single tool where every single commitment made can be found and tracked. That’s your task management tool.

✅ Jira, ClickUp, Notion.

❌ OKR software, Email, Slack, sticky notes.

Your task management tool is more important than your OKR tool, your team wiki tool and your KPI tracking tool.

An important rule on my team is this:

Step 4: Establish a Meeting SOP

Our weekly planning meeting is the final piece of our distributed accountability system, but first, I had to “design it”

People don’t hate meetings; they hate poorly planned and run meetings. So, I created and modelled a standard operating procedure (SOP) for our weekly meetings that ensures we identify and operationalise the only two things that matter about any meeting.

1. Decisions.

2. Action items.

A decision provides context for action items. An action item is the kernel of a commitment.

Because of the SOP, I don’t run our routine weekly meetings. Each of my direct reports takes turns running it (using the SOP), and they

• evaluate reports (of commitments) from their peers

• ask questions about quality (DOD checklist)

• point out accountability lapses.

Accountability Done Right

1. Level 1: Accountability is the manager’s job

2. Level 2: Accountability is the process’s job

3. Level 3: Accountability is everyone’s job

This system helped me (and other managers I help) go from Level 1 to 60% of Level 3.

• Without commitment, there is no accountability.

• Without accountability, there are no results.

• Without results, WTF are we even doing?

Until next time ... be BRILLIANT! 💎