A Five-Step Formula for Achieving an Accountability Culture That Works
Most people hear the word accountability, and they think discipline. Pressure. Non-stop follow ups.
That’s not what accountability really looks like.
“Accountability is an architecture for your business that keeps it running smoothly,” says CEO Coach David Desharnais. “When the architecture isn’t working, you spend your whole week chasing people down and wondering, ‘Why can’t my team just own this?’”
When accountability is in place properly, your organization moves forward toward your goals with a solid rhythm. Here’s how to make that happen:
Five steps to unlock a culture of accountability for your team
Creating a culture of accountability starts with you. There’s a reason the bottleneck is at the top of the bottle. But if you start thinking about accountability as a set of systems in place for your organization, it gets easier. Here’s how:
1. Choose a North Star in your annual plan
“This is where leaders think they’re clear, but there’s a big difference between clear and usable,” says Desharnais. “If you were to ask your five leadership team members what the company’s North Star is, in most organizations, you’ll get five different answers. That’s not ideal.”
To fix that, you need a specific goal that your entire team can rally around. Think about it like this: If you tell your GPS to take you to New York, you could end up in Manhattan or you could end up in Buffalo…which are 381 miles apart.
In a business context, that looks like setting a goal of $150 million in ARR by December 2027, or a 35% EBITDA margin by a certain date. That’s a specific target that creates focus across the team.
Says Desharnais, “Once you have your North Star, you can go backwards with the math of how to get there, from revenue to customers, opportunities, and weekly actions so you can quantify the actual day-to-day work that helps you achieve your goals.”
And remember: Less is more. Choose no more than three priorities. “It’s a classic mistake to try and do it all,” says Desharnais. “You can’t do everything at once and expect to succeed.”
2. Set clear roles, responsibilities, and ownership
One of the most common frustrations our coaches hear from CEOs is that everything comes back to them. “As a CEO, by definition, your job is 100% of the company,” says Desharnais. “But if your leadership team isn’t stepping up or handling their responsibilities, you end up filling that gap. This is why CEOs end up working 24/7 and can’t pull themselves out of it.”
Some of this can be from team members underperforming. But often, it’s a mismatch in ownership among your team. As you look at your North Star, you’ll need:
- One owner for every goal
- Two or three KPIs that measure that goal
- A system to track the progress against that goal
- Consequences (and incentives) to motivate your team to achieve that goal
“A good litmus test would be to say, can everyone connect what they’re doing day to day to the North Star that you have? It should be one simple sentence. If not, you’re giving tasks without ownership, and nobody knows what to do with that,” Desharnais says.
To fix it, run a weekly 30-minute 1:1 with your leadership team, and for the first five minutes, you should look at your dashboard, then assess priorities, blockers, and support for each team member. Have your leaders do this with their team, too. As it goes down the line, you’ll see your organization become more aligned.
3. Measure your progress in a transparent and tangible way
“What you measure is what you do,” says CEO Coach Dan Smytka. “Selecting these metrics is very important, and should be connected to your North Star as a company.”
That means your dashboard should include KPIs with specific, measurable activities. More importantly, though, it’s about making sure those KPIs—and the progress you’re making against them—are visible for everyone in the company.
That includes lagging indicators like customer satisfaction but also leading indicators like time-to-value that help you predict the outcome early on. Adds Smytka, “Leading indicators are the lamp posts to the journey to the North Star you’re trying to achieve. It’s a way to understand if you’re on the right path, so you can respond.”
4. Establish a rhythm that brings the team together
It’s not enough to give your team a dashboard. You need to connect with them on a regular basis to hold them accountable.
“After the annual plan, you break it down into quarters. Then you have 13 weeks within a quarter to execute the quarterly outcomes from the annual plan,” says Smytka. “That’s where you’re really trying to drive momentum and performance, and so you want to make those adjustments weekly. Most teams do an annual plan and then don’t get back to it, and so they drift off course.”
At the end of each quarter, do a retrospective that course corrects for the rest of the year. Ask yourself:
- What went right?
- What went wrong?
- What did we learn?
- What is the greatest opportunity in front of us?
- What is the greatest challenge we’re facing right now?
- What is one thing we could do as a team that would have the single biggest impact on the outcomes we’re looking for?
“Those questions are really powerful because they allow the team and you as a leader to step back and reflect so you can reset your course and make adjustments. You need to zoom out,” he adds.
5. Model accountability behavior for your team
Your success with accountability starts at the top. It sends a message throughout the organization when you hold yourself accountable by working with a CEO coach.
“I have a few clients that have gone back and added accountability as a value for their organization, because it’s so important to them,” says Smytka. “Having a CEO coach sends a huge signal to your team that this is important to you. It’s our job to facilitate your goals. We challenge, we supplement, we provide perspective so the team can move forward so you can build a culture of accountability throughout your team.”
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CEO Coaching International works with CEOs and their leadership teams to achieve extraordinary results quarter after quarter, year after year. Known globally for its success in coaching growth-focused entrepreneurs to meaningful exits, the firm has coached more than 2,000 CEOs and entrepreneurs across 100+ industries and 90 countries. Its coaches—former CEOs, presidents, and executives—have led businesses ranging from startups to over $10 billion, driving double-digit sales and profit growth, many culminating in eight, nine, or ten-figure exits.
Companies that have worked with CEO Coaching International for two years or more have achieved an average revenue CAGR of 22.8%, nearly 2X the U.S. average, and an average EBITDA CAGR of 37.5%, nearly 3X the national benchmark.
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