We spend a lot of time in leadership development talking about how leaders can hold their teams accountable.
How to set expectations clearly. How to give feedback that doesn’t damage relationships. How to address underperformance without eroding trust. Those are important conversations, and we’ve had many of them.
But there’s a version of this conversation that almost never happens — and I think it’s the most important one.
Who is holding the leader accountable?
The model we’ve built for organizational accountability is almost entirely top-down. The person above you holds you accountable. You hold the people below you accountable. And so it goes, all the way down. What that model leaves largely unaddressed is what happens when the problem is at the top — or when the leader of a leader in the chain doesn’t have the courage to look.
I’ve seen this play out in organizations where a leader was visibly effective at the peer and executive level — confident, articulate, results-driven — while quietly creating an environment of fear and uncertainty for the people they actually led. Not in a dramatic way. In the daily, grinding way that comes from inconsistency, from unclear expectations held against people anyway, from a culture where it was understood that speaking up was a risk.
And the person above that leader? They knew what the results looked like. They didn’t know what the environment felt like. They assumed that because nobody was complaining, things were fine.
Of course nobody was complaining. The environment wasn’t safe enough to complain.
That’s what I call the ostrich approach to leadership accountability. If you close your eyes and don’t ask the question, you can tell yourself there isn’t a problem — because you can’t see one. But the absence of a complaint in an unsafe environment is not evidence of health. It’s evidence of silence.
The leader of the leader has a responsibility here that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough. It takes courage to inquire — not just whether results are being achieved, but whether the environment those results are achieved in is one worth sustaining. Whether the people below feel safe enough to speak, trusted enough to take initiative, and clear enough on expectations to be held fairly accountable.
And here’s the harder question that has to follow: if you find out that your leader is creating an environment of anxiety, are their results worth that price? And if your answer is yes — do you have the courage to own that answer when someone two levels below asks?
Because if you’re not willing to own it, and you pretend you weren’t aware — that’s its own kind of gaslighting.
Real accountability doesn’t just flow downward. It has to go in every direction — including up. And it starts with leaders who are willing to ask the question, even when they’re not sure they’re ready for the answer.
If accountability in your organization feels one-directional, let’s talk about what it would take to change that.
Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash
