First, Break the Leadership Style: Building a Culture of Accountability and Ownership

I have lost count of the number of corporate offsites and managers’ meets where I have been invited to speak about accountability. As a leadership keynote speaker when I am asked to talk about accountability, the brief is almost always the same: ‘We want our people to think like owners.’ Leadership teams want employees who take complete responsibility for their role, who treat a customer’s problem as their own problem, who don’t wait to be told what to do. It is a reasonable thing to want. Most workplaces I walk into are filled with capable, well-meaning people who have quietly decided that giving a hundred percent is optional rather than expected.

But over the years, as I have worked with organisations trying to build this culture, I have arrived at an uncomfortable conclusion that I now open most of my keynotes with: you cannot train accountability into people if the leadership structure around them makes ownership impossible. Before you fix the employee, you have to fix the system, and often, you have to fix the leadership style first.

The Bartender Who Never Called the Manager

I often tell audiences about a well-known practice used by a leading international hotel chain, one I reference constantly because it captures the entire argument in a single scene. At their properties, a bartender who realises a guest is unhappy with a cocktail is empowered to use a defined portion of the bar’s stock — without asking permission — to make it right immediately. No call to the manager. No explanation needed later. The employee is not simply following a task list; they are accountable to an outcome, which is guest satisfaction, and they have been trusted with the authority to deliver it.

This is not far from the philosophy behind the Ritz-Carlton’s famous internal policy, widely covered in management literature, which allows every employee — regardless of position — discretionary spending authority to resolve a guest’s problem on the spot, without managerial approval. Harvard Business Review and other management publications have cited this practice for decades as a textbook example of what happens when an organisation ties empowerment directly to a customer outcome rather than a rigid set of instructions.

I contrast this often with an experience of my own. I was once staying at a five-star property that, despite its rating, was clearly being run by a less experienced and highly procedural front-of-house team. Room service offered two types of complimentary fruit platters. When I asked for the second option instead of the one assigned to my room category, I was politely refused — ‘this one is only for another set of rooms.’ The staff member wasn’t lazy or careless. He was simply executing a task, with no visibility into, or authority over, the actual outcome the hotel was trying to achieve, which was my satisfaction as a guest. That small refusal told me everything about how decisions were made in that building, and it almost certainly was not an isolated incident.

Why Hierarchy Quietly Kills Accountability

Most organisations I work with operate on some version of a hierarchical chain, and there is nothing inherently wrong with hierarchy — it exists for good reasons of governance and consistency. The problem begins when every non-routine decision has to travel up that chain before it can be acted on. When a junior employee cannot resolve a customer’s problem without first checking with a supervisor, who then checks with their own manager, the employee is never actually accountable for the outcome. They are only accountable for following the correct escalation path.

Daniel Pink’s influential book Drive makes an argument I return to constantly in my sessions: motivation and ownership are driven by autonomy, mastery, and purpose, not by tighter supervision or better-worded task instructions. Pink’s synthesis of decades of behavioural research found that when people are given genuine control over how they approach their work, their intrinsic commitment to the outcome increases substantially, often producing better results than when they are simply told what to do and monitored for compliance. Autonomy, in other words, is not the reward you give people after they’ve proven themselves accountable. It is the precondition that makes accountability possible in the first place.

I saw this principle in action, almost as a controlled experiment, with a retail banking client in Mumbai. Two branches, similar size, similar customer profile, run by two very different branch managers. One insisted that any exception to standard process — a waived fee, an expedited service — be approved by him personally. The other trained his team on the outcome he wanted (a satisfied, retained customer) and let his staff use judgement on how to get there, within a clearly defined boundary. Over eighteen months, the second branch had noticeably higher customer retention and, almost as a side effect, noticeably lower staff attrition. The employees in that branch described feeling ‘trusted’ in a way their counterparts at the first branch did not.

The Right to Make Mistakes

If autonomy is the precondition for accountability, the right to fail safely is what sustains it. I ask almost every leadership group I work with the same question: what happens in your organisation when someone tries something new and it doesn’t work? The answer, more often than I would like, involves some version of blame, documentation, or a quiet note in a performance review. And once that becomes the pattern, employees stop taking any initiative that carries risk, because the downside of a visible mistake outweighs the upside of a successful judgement call.

Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety, which she has written about extensively including in her book The Fearless Organization, found that teams which treat failure as a source of learning rather than blame consistently outperform teams that punish it, particularly in environments requiring judgement, innovation, or fast decision-making. Her work distinguishes between blameworthy failure — genuine negligence — and intelligent failure, the kind that occurs when a reasonable, well-intentioned decision simply doesn’t produce the desired result. Organisations that cannot make that distinction end up punishing exactly the kind of initiative they claim to want.

Reed Hastings, co-founder of Netflix, described a related philosophy in his book No Rules Rules, built around what Netflix calls ‘freedom and responsibility.’ Rather than layering approval processes to prevent every possible mistake, Netflix’s culture deliberately removes many controls and trusts employees to exercise judgement, treating the occasional bad decision as a reasonable cost of a culture that also produces far more good decisions made quickly. I have adapted a lighter version of this thinking for more traditional Indian corporate environments, where the instinct to add another layer of approval after a mistake is strong. My advice is almost always the opposite: use the mistake as a training scenario, not a control mechanism.

Creating Scenarios, Not Just Assigning Tasks

One practical shift I coach managers through is the difference between assigning a task and preparing someone for a scenario. A task tells an employee what to do. A scenario prepares them for what might happen and equips them with the judgement to handle it when it does. I worked with a client in the hospitality sector to rebuild their frontline training entirely around scenarios — a guest complaint, a billing dispute, an unexpected VIP request — rather than a checklist of duties. Employees were trained on the outcome expected in each scenario, given a defined boundary of authority, and then trusted to use it. Complaint resolution times improved considerably, largely because employees were no longer waiting for a supervisor to become available before acting.

Fortune Magazine’s coverage of high-performing service organisations has repeatedly highlighted this same pattern: companies known for exceptional customer experience tend to train employees on principles and outcomes rather than exhaustive scripts, precisely because real customer situations rarely follow a script exactly.

Don’t Be the Banyan Tree

I often close this topic with an image I have used in keynotes across the country: don’t be a banyan tree. A banyan tree spreads such a dense canopy that almost nothing grows beneath it. Leaders who hold on to every decision, who cannot resist stepping in whenever an employee is about to make a judgement call, create exactly that kind of shade. Their intentions are usually good — control feels safer, mistakes feel costly — but the long-term effect is a workforce that never develops the muscle of ownership, because it was never given the sunlight to do so.

The leaders I have seen build genuinely accountable cultures do the opposite. They show their people the outcome that matters, give them real authority to pursue it, allow honest failure along the way, and then, deliberately, get out of the way. That last part is often the hardest for a leader to do, and it is also, in my experience, the single biggest determinant of whether an organisation ends up with employees who merely follow instructions, or employees who genuinely act like owners.