Marcus’s managers were not lazy.
They arrived early. Their calendars were full. They attended meetings, answered emails and solved problems throughout the day.
Yet Marcus still felt as though he was running the company himself. This is an important distinction for growing businesses.
Activity is not ownership. You can have a hardworking leadership team and still have weak leadership team accountability.
Completing Work Is Not The Same As Owning An Outcome
Ask a senior leader: “What are you responsible for?”
If the answer is a list of activities, pay attention.
“I run the weekly meetings.”
“I prepare the report.”
“I oversee scheduling.”
“I speak with the sales team.”
Those are things they do.
What are they accountable for achieving?
Strong leadership roles require outcomes.
A sales leader might own predictable profitable revenue.
An operations leader might own reliable delivery against defined quality and margin standards.
The precise outcome will differ by company.
The point is that someone must be able to say: This result is mine to lead.
Overlapping Responsibility Creates Invisible Gaps
Sometimes several people appear responsible for the same outcome.
In reality, nobody is.
Sales thinks operations owns onboarding.
Operations assumes customer service is managing expectations.
Customer service believes sales promised the outcome.
Eventually, a customer complains. Marcus gets involved.
When responsibility overlaps without clear accountability, work tends to move towards the person with the greatest authority. Often that is the founder.
You Cannot Demand Ownership Without Giving Authority
This is where many leadership structures contradict themselves.
A manager is told: “You need to take more ownership.”
But she cannot approve the expenditure, change the process, challenge another department, adjust the staffing, negotiate the commercial term or say no to the client.
If leaders are held responsible for outcomes but lack the authority to influence those outcomes, accountability becomes theatre.
Founder Overrides Matter
Marcus also had to confront his own behaviour.
He wanted managers to lead until their decision differed from his.
Every unnecessary founder override sends a message through the organisation: Your authority lasts until I disagree.
Do that enough times and talented managers stop taking risks. They bring decisions back to the founder, who will eventually complain that nobody takes ownership.
Define Decision Rights
Leadership accountability becomes much clearer when everyone understands:
- Which decisions they own
- Which decisions require consultation
- Which decisions require approval
- What financial limits apply
- Which risks must be escalated
- What outcome they are accountable for
- How success will be measured
This does not eliminate collaboration. It makes collaboration clearer.
Accountability Must Travel Across The Leadership Team
A mature leadership team cannot operate as several managers each protecting their own department. They are collectively responsible for the performance of the company.
That means being willing to challenge each other in order to resolve competing priorities, address performance problems, make trade-offs, and to keep issues at the appropriate level rather than sending them upwards unnecessarily.
The founder should not permanently serve as referee between functional leaders.
Look At Your Leadership Meetings
Meetings reveal a great deal about accountability.
Do your leadership meetings consist primarily of people reporting what they did?
Or do they focus on:
- Outcomes
- Performance against agreed measures
- Significant constraints
- Decisions
- Risks
- Cross-functional dependencies
- Commitments for the next period
The first creates updates. The second creates management.
Stop Asking Whether People Are Busy
Busy is easy to see.
Ownership is different.
Ask instead: What business outcome would deteriorate if this leader stopped leading it well?
If that question is difficult to answer, the role may not be sufficiently clear.
Strong leadership team accountability does not begin with telling people to work harder.
It begins with giving competent people clear outcomes, meaningful authority and visible responsibility for results.
And the founder has a responsibility too.
Once authority has genuinely been transferred, allow people to use it.
