The Accountability Trap: Why Your Best Leaders Are Making It Worse

There is an old joke about a road crew that goes something like this. A man is assigned to paint the centre line down a long stretch of highway. Halfway through, he reaches a fallen branch lying across the road. He paints around it. Comes back the next day, paints around it again. It was never his job to move the branch. He was told to paint the line, and technically, he did.

It is a small story with an uncomfortable punchline for anyone running a fast-paced company, because most organisations do not have an accountability problem in the way they think they do. What they have is a branch sitting in the middle of the road, and a leadership culture that has trained everyone, again and again, to paint around it.

That argument came out of a recent AMI Enterprise leadership session on accountability, in a conversation between Brenda Wakaba, an HR consultant who has spent fifteen years inside African organisations, and Caroline Kamau, a Change Management Specialist. What came out was not a motivational talk about ownership. Rather, it was closer to a systems diagnosis, and it should concern any executive who still thinks accountability is a personality trait you hire for.

The Clarity Problem 

Brenda cited research showing that close to half of new hires fail within eighteen months, not because they lack the skill for the job, but because of unclear expectations, poor onboarding, and misaligned values from day one. "This is not a people problem," she said. "It is a clarity problem." And it begins long before the person's first day, in how clearly the organisation has already defined what success looks like.

This is the part most performance conversations skip. Companies love to talk about consequences: the review, the improvement plan, and the difficult conversation. Far fewer talk about what came before it; the upstream work of making sure a person actually knew, in specific and repeated terms, what they were responsible for and why it mattered to the business. 

Brenda's phrase for this was blunt and worth stealing for your next leadership offsite: "clarity before consequence." When we punish an unclear expectation without building accountability, we’re teaching our teams that the fastest way to avoid blame is to do as little as possible.

Accountability without authority is not accountability

Brenda argued that a lot of what companies call accountability is actually something else entirely, dressed up to look virtuous. "You cannot hold a manager accountable for retention if they have no say in compensation, no budget for development, and no voice in hiring decisions," she said. "That is not accountability. That feels more like blame redistribution."

Sit with that for a second, because it reframes a habit that is close to universal in fast-growing companies. Leadership hands someone a metric, withholds the authority to actually move that metric, and then treats the missed target as a failure of will rather than a failure of design. It is, in effect, punishing people for outcomes the organisation itself made structurally impossible for them to control. 

Jocko Willink, the former Navy SEAL commander turned business consultant, has built an entire leadership philosophy on a related but sharper claim: there are no bad teams, only bad leaders, and when something goes wrong the first place a leader should look is in the mirror, not down the org chart. Brenda's point sharpens that same idea. Ownership means nothing without the authority to back it up. Accountability without real decision-making power is simply a liability shield.

There is a cost to this that never makes it into the accountability conversation, and it is not a morale cost. Every decision waiting on a signature is revenue waiting on a signature too. When we centralise enough decisions long enough, managers stop deciding, and eventually they lose the ability to develop judgement that would have let them decide well. Eventually the CEO who centralised everything is the same CEO that complains that the bench is thin. That is not a talent shortage; it is the predictable outcome of the system that produced it.

People do not become accountable because a leader tells them to own the outcome. They become accountable once a leader has already removed the excuse, clarity instead of ambiguity, authority instead of borrowed responsibility, a model instead of a mandate, that would have let them avoid owning it in the first place.

If your organisation is struggling with these systemic issues, our Leadership Development Programme provides the practical, hands-on training your managers need to build true accountability.

A Gen Z Problem or a Wrong Diagnosis?

The session's sharpest reframe came when the conversation turned to the tension nearly every African executive is currently living through, between senior leaders who built their careers in command-and-control environments and younger professionals who expect to understand the why before they execute the what. The easy explanation, the one repeated in nearly every LinkedIn post about Gen Z in the workplace, is that younger employees simply lack accountability. Caroline rejected that framing entirely. "This is not a talent problem," she said. "This is a culture design problem."

Her argument deserves more airtime than it got in the room. Senior leaders whose authority was built on being the person with the answers experience delegation as a loss of relevance, not an act of trust. Younger professionals who grew up with unlimited access to information experience over-control as a signal that they are not trusted, and they do not comply silently the way earlier generations were trained to. 

Neither side, Caroline pointed out, is wrong about what they are experiencing, but both are wrong about what is causing it. The fix she proposed was that leaders should learn to narrate the handover out loud, publicly transferring ownership rather than hoping someone steps up, until decision-making at lower levels becomes the norm rather than the exception.

There is a real cost to getting this wrong, and it shows up on the income statement long before it shows up in an engagement survey. Caroline made the point that most performance systems reward results while punishing the risk-taking that actually produces them. A team member makes a bold call, it does not work out, and the response is blame rather than a coaching conversation. That employee, and everyone watching, learns exactly one lesson from that moment: never make that move again. 

Alex Hormozi, who has scaled a portfolio of companies past nine figures partly on the strength of operational discipline, makes a version of this same argument from the opposite direction. His formula for building accountable teams runs on expectations, measurement, and consistent reinforcement, the theory being that ambiguity, not laziness, is what actually kills execution. 

When we punish the wrong thing consistently, we get exactly the behaviour we punished for, at scale, from our best people first.

What this actually costs a company

It is tempting to file all of this under culture, the soft stuff, the thing that gets a slide in the all-hands deck and nothing else. That would be a mistake, and an expensive one. Every high performer who learns that a bold call gets punished rather than coached will, eventually, stop making bold calls, taking whatever growth-driving instinct they had with them when they leave for a company that will actually use it. And every manager held responsible for a number they have no authority to move is a resignation letter with a delay timer on it.

Brenda closed with a line that is worth pinning above every leadership team's next planning session. "People don't resist accountability," she said. "What people resist is when things are ambiguous." The job of a leader, in her framing, is not to demand more ownership from a team. It is to make ambiguity safe, to remove the barriers standing in the way of the outcome, and then to be the first person in the room whose own behaviour matches what was just asked of everyone else.

Which brings the conversation back to that branch in the road. Most companies do not need another accountability initiative, another values poster, another framework borrowed from a book written for a different context entirely. They need to look, honestly, at how many of their best people have learned that the smartest career move available to them is to paint carefully around the thing nobody gave them permission to move. 

Most companies treat accountability as a character problem. It has always been an architectural one. Accountability was never a personality trait waiting to be hired for. It is an architectural decision, made or avoided every time a leader chooses whether to hand someone the branch or paint around it for them. The companies that get this right will not be the ones with the most accountable people. They will be the ones that stopped asking people to be accountable for a road they were never given the tools to fix. Ready to build a culture of real accountability? Explore our Leadership Development Programme to equip your team with the tools and authority they need to succeed.