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Article · 7 min read

The Accountability Paradox: Why senior leaders struggle to hold each other accountable

Everyone's accountable. Until it's someone sitting around the boardroom table.

There's something rather fascinating happening in senior leadership teams. They're responsible for setting standards, driving performance, shaping culture and ensuring people across the organisation deliver on their commitments.

And yet, when it comes to holding each other accountable? Things can get a little awkward.

A missed deadline from a junior employee? That's a performance conversation. A missed deadline from a department manager? That's an escalation.

A missed deadline from Dave, the Finance Director?

"Well, Dave's got quite a lot on at the moment."

Poor Dave.

Apparently, accountability comes with an exemption clause once you've reached a certain level of seniority.

And while that's obviously a slightly exaggerated example (although perhaps not as exaggerated as we'd like to believe), it raises a serious question.

Why do the people responsible for creating accountability across an organisation so often struggle to practise it amongst themselves?

The research is rather uncomfortable

In March 2026, Gallup published research examining seven core leadership competencies, including building relationships, developing people, communicating clearly and creating accountability.

Guess which one came last?

Accountability.

Just 46% of leaders rated themselves as exceptional or outstanding at creating accountability. When managers were asked to rate their own leaders, that figure dropped to 30%.

And there's another interesting finding. Managers who rated their leaders as exceptional or outstanding at creating accountability were three times as likely to be engaged at work as those who didn't (51% compared with 17%).

Now, that doesn't mean accountability alone causes higher engagement. But it certainly suggests that how leaders create accountability matters enormously.

And it raises an interesting possibility. Perhaps one of the biggest barriers to organisational performance isn't a lack of strategy, talent or ambition.

Perhaps it's the inability of senior leaders to hold each other to the standards they expect everyone else to meet.

Why does accountability become so difficult at the top?

Here's where the psychology gets interesting.

We like to imagine that senior leaders operate with extraordinary levels of rationality, objectivity and emotional maturity. After all, they've reached the top of their professions. Surely they're comfortable with difficult conversations?

Well, not necessarily.

Because regardless of job title, salary or how impressive someone's LinkedIn biography might be, we're still human beings. And human beings have some rather inconvenient psychological tendencies.

1. We're motivated to protect our social standing

Our brains are highly sensitive to social threats. Being rejected, criticised, excluded or losing status within a group can trigger powerful emotional responses, and challenging someone of equal seniority introduces a degree of interpersonal risk.

What if they become defensive? What if it damages the relationship? What if I need their support next month? What if they start questioning my performance in return?

Suddenly, asking Dave why he hasn't delivered that financial report feels considerably less appealing.

Research into psychological safety, including Amy Edmondson's influential work, has demonstrated how perceptions of interpersonal risk influence whether people feel comfortable speaking up, challenging assumptions and discussing mistakes.

And seniority doesn't magically remove those psychological dynamics.

2. We confuse keeping the peace with maintaining trust

Many senior leadership teams place enormous value on relationships. Understandably. But there's a difference between having good relationships and having relationships that are strong enough to withstand challenge.

A leadership team can be incredibly friendly, supportive and harmonious while simultaneously being spectacularly ineffective.

Everyone agrees in meetings, nobody wants to upset anyone, difficult conversations happen privately (if they happen at all), and problems are politely carried forward to the next meeting.

The problem is that avoiding discomfort doesn't necessarily protect trust. Sometimes it slowly destroys it.

Because when people repeatedly fail to deliver without being challenged, everyone else notices. And eventually, the unspoken question becomes: "Why am I being held to a standard that apparently doesn't apply to them?"

3. We mistake seniority for independence

This is perhaps the most dangerous one.

At senior levels, leaders often operate with significant autonomy. They have their own departments, budgets, priorities and responsibilities. Over time, this can create an unspoken agreement: I'll stay out of your business if you stay out of mine.

Which sounds perfectly reasonable until you remember that a senior leadership team is supposed to operate as a collective, not simply as a collection of highly paid individuals who happen to share a meeting room.

Organisational performance depends on interdependence. Finance affects Operations, Operations affects People, People affects Commercial, and so on.

When leaders avoid challenging one another, they risk prioritising departmental independence over collective performance.

That's not teamwork. That's a collection of individual empires with a shared calendar invitation.

The accountability paradox

Here's what I find particularly interesting.

Many senior leaders are perfectly comfortable telling their managers to have courageous conversations. They commission leadership development programmes, introduce performance management frameworks and talk about ownership, responsibility and high standards.

They might even put "accountability" on a lovely poster next to "integrity" and "collaboration".

But accountability isn't something you can delegate downwards while exempting yourself from practising it sideways.

If accountability only travels down the organisational hierarchy, it isn't a cultural standard. It's a power dynamic.

And that distinction matters because people don't simply learn what matters in an organisation by reading its values. They learn by watching what leaders tolerate.

If the senior leadership team regularly avoids difficult conversations, fails to follow through on commitments or allows certain individuals to operate under different standards, those behaviours can become normalised.

The organisation learns what accountability really means. And it's often rather different from what the leadership team claims it means.

Three things senior leadership teams need to rethink

Accountability isn't an inherent personality trait. It's something that can be developed through the right behaviours, expectations and organisational conditions.

But improving it requires more than telling leaders to have difficult conversations or sending them on another workshop. It requires a fundamental rethink of how senior leadership teams operate together.

1. Accountability needs to be a collective agreement

One of the biggest challenges with peer accountability is that questioning someone's performance can feel like questioning their competence or authority.

Senior leadership teams need to move away from seeing accountability as something one individual imposes on another and towards recognising it as a shared responsibility.

That means developing a collective understanding of what accountability looks like, how colleagues should challenge one another and what happens when commitments aren't delivered.

Without that shared understanding, accountability becomes dependent on individual personalities, relationships and whoever happens to be brave enough to speak up.

2. Psychological safety shouldn't mean avoiding discomfort

Psychological safety has become an enormously popular concept in leadership development, and rightly so. But there's a difference between creating an environment where people feel safe to speak up and creating one where nobody ever feels uncomfortable.

In fact, genuine psychological safety should make constructive challenge more possible, not less.

Senior leadership teams need to develop the trust and maturity to disagree, question decisions and address underperformance without interpreting every challenge as a personal attack.

The goal isn't to create a leadership team where everyone feels comfortable all the time. It's to create one where people feel safe enough to be uncomfortable.

And that requires considerably more than simply encouraging people to speak openly.

3. Accountability needs to become part of how the team operates

If accountability only happens when something goes wrong, it's already too late.

Too many senior leadership teams rely on individual courage rather than consistent ways of working. Commitments are made, priorities shift, meetings come and go, and somehow the things people agreed to deliver quietly disappear.

Effective accountability needs to be embedded into the normal rhythm of the leadership team, with clear expectations, visible commitments and consistent follow-through.

Not as another bureaucratic reporting exercise, but as a fundamental part of how leaders work together to deliver collective outcomes.

Because when accountability becomes a normal part of how a team operates, it no longer needs to depend on someone finding the courage to initiate an awkward conversation.

The real test of a senior leadership team

I don't think the strongest senior leadership teams are necessarily the ones that agree most often, get along brilliantly or have the most impressive individual leaders.

I think they're the ones where people have enough trust, maturity and shared commitment to challenge each other when it matters. Where a missed commitment isn't ignored because someone is influential, disagreement isn't automatically interpreted as disloyalty, and accountability is something leaders practise with each other rather than simply demand from everyone below them.

Because the ultimate test of a leadership team's culture isn't what happens when everyone delivers.

It's what happens when someone doesn't.

Especially Dave.

So, if you're part of a senior leadership team, here's something worth reflecting on. When was the last time someone in your team openly and constructively challenged another senior leader for failing to deliver on a commitment? And perhaps more importantly, what happened next?

The answer might tell you more about the health of your leadership team than your latest employee engagement survey.

And if those questions make you slightly uncomfortable, that might be a very good place to start.

Developing a genuinely accountable senior leadership team takes more than good intentions. It requires an honest understanding of the behaviours, relationships and working practices that are helping or hindering collective performance. If that's something your leadership team is grappling with, I'd be happy to explore it with you.

Research and further reading