Modern Leaders Have An Accountability Problem. Here’s What It’s Costing Their Teams

By Ben Price, men’s coach, author and founder of The Kingmaker Initiation, a 90-day high-stakes development program for founders, leaders and fathers focused on personal accountability, identity and “king-level” leadership.

The most expensive thing in most organisations is the conversations that leaders are too scared to make happen. The conversation with the underperformer everyone knows about, and nobody wants to address. The strategy that stopped working six months ago or the toxic dynamic in the leadership team that is understood by everyone and discussed by no one. They are not unfortunate circumstances or complex organisational challenges. They are leadership failures. The leader failed to act, to speak and chose their own comfort over the mission.

It is something worth understanding that, according to the Chartered Management Institute, 82 percent of people who enter management positions in the UK have had no formal leadership training whatsoever.* The CMI calls them accidental managers: someone who was good at their job, reliable, knowledgeable and valued, so they got promoted. And the moment they stepped into a leadership role, the skills that earned the promotion became largely irrelevant. Because leading people is an entirely different discipline from being good at the work.

The same pattern often repeats with entrepreneurs. Someone is exceptionally good at something, so they start a company. For a while, that is enough, but at a certain point the business does not need them to be brilliant; it needs them to be a great leader, and this is where most founders stall.

The goal of great leadership is not to be needed; it is to build a team capable of operating without you. To empower the people around you to make decisions, own problems and resolve situations without your involvement, not be kept in the loop, actually not needed. That is the mark of a leader who has genuinely done the work.

I spent eight years in British Army Intelligence, including four combat deployments. In that environment, accountability was not a culture initiative or a value printed on a wall. It was the operating standard and a non-negotiable. Because in that world, the cost of a conversation not had could cost lives.

The military trains its values relentlessly; courage is developed, and if you consistently fail to uphold those values, you get removed. Because a real value is performed under pressure. If you cannot perform it under pressure, you do not hold the value.

Most organisations create their values as an afterthought. A branding exercise, something to show off to customers; they list them but do not train for them. They do not discuss what those values require when the pressure is real and they do not hold anyone to a standard with genuine consequences when it is not met.

That is a leadership failure

One of my mentors said it like this, shit rolls downhill. That includes the culture and the mindset. Whatever the leader tolerates, accepts, avoids or models travels through the organisation. Through daily observation, the team watches what the leader actually does when the pressure is on and calibrates their own behaviour accordingly. If the leader avoids accountability when it is uncomfortable, the team learns that accountability is optional. A real value is performed under pressure, and when the leader does not perform it, they have just taught the entire organisation that the value is optional.

Here is what it is costing

The person not being held accountable is being failed. Protecting them from honest feedback is not kindness; it is a leadership failure.

And this extends to the team watching what is being failed. High performers have an acute sensitivity as to whether standards are upheld under pressure or only when it is easy. When they observe that the values on the wall do not apply when things get uncomfortable, they revise their assessment downward. Research shows almost one in three workers have left a job because of a negative relationship with their manager.* That is not a retention problem; that is a leadership failure.

Every significant organisational and relational crisis I have observed has had a row of avoided conversations sitting upstream of it. There is no culture problem that is not, at its root, a leadership failure. Because a real value is performed under pressure, and the pressure test always comes.

The military built courage into the foundation of how it develops leaders, held people to that standard with real consequences and treated values not as aspirational language but as the operating system of everything. Most organisations hire capable people, hand them a leadership title, print some values on a wall and hope courage arrives with it.

It does not; courage is trained, and accountability is modelled from the top or it does not exist at all. The fix begins with the leader performing the value they claim to hold, under the pressure they have been avoiding.

Issue the orders. Have the conversations and move your mission forward.