A lot of people have been through accountability that was really just blame — punishment for outcomes they were never clearly assigned, or a tool for deflecting responsibility away from leadership. That experience is real, and it leaves a mark.
The answer isn’t to abandon accountability. It’s to build accountability systems that are actually fair.
Fair accountability starts with clear assignment. You can’t hold someone responsible for an outcome they weren’t explicitly asked to own. Most accountability failures I see in organizations trace back to exactly this: ownership was assumed rather than stated, and when something went wrong everyone had a different understanding of who was supposed to handle it.
It requires that people have the resources and authority they need to deliver what they’ve been asked to deliver. Holding someone accountable for an outcome while withholding the authority to actually produce it isn’t accountability. It’s a setup.
It requires consistency. If the same standard doesn’t apply to everyone, including leadership, the accountability system is theater. People see it immediately, even when they don’t say anything about it.
Organizations that get accountability right tend to have high performance and low drama. People know what they own, they have what they need, and when something goes wrong there’s a clear process for understanding what happened rather than a scramble to assign blame. That’s not a utopian description. It’s just what organizations look like when they’ve done the structural work.