“How do I hold my people accountable?”
There's a better way than hire → hope → retaliate
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“How do I hold my people accountable?” is the #1 question I get from the CEOs I teach.
The answer is relatively simple, but it’s not easy and it requires a pretty involved process. I will lay out that process for you below because I think it’s important - and most CEOs and managers do only a very compressed version of it. That compression is what leads to the very common headaches around accountability.
Ready?
The accountability process begins before you ever hire someone. It starts with you answering two questions: What job needs to be done? Who fits that role best?
Making sure your hire has the right aptitude and motivation is critical. You can’t hold someone accountable for work they don’t have the skills to perform or the motivation to engage in.
Note that finding people with the right fit usually requires you to do more than sift through resumes. It requires hunting for rare talent.
Once you’ve hired the right person, the next step in the accountability process is micro-training. Too many businesses skip this entirely, then act surprised when the new hire doesn’t do things the way they want.
Micro-training is required for every role - even executives - because every business is different. Every job requires specific training on how things get done in your company. This training period could last anywhere from a couple weeks to several months, depending on the complexity of the role.
Now you’ve hired well and trained thoroughly. Ready to hold them accountable? Not quite. Now, you need to document their responsibilities and key metrics in what I call an Executive Performance Profile. This step, too, gets skipped or glossed over all the time, but it’s essential.
What are the job responsibilities? Revisit the list you created during hiring and refine it with the employee. For executive hires, I also include a discussion of the key metrics we’ll use to judge performance. Then I ask them to track those metrics regularly so we can review them each quarter, along with 3-6 quarterly goals set collaboratively.
The Weekly Check-In
The final piece of the accountability foundation is regular check-ins, usually a weekly 1:1. At these meetings, ask each employee:
“How likely are you to achieve these goals on time?”
Notice we’re asking for a prediction, not a progress report. This may seem subtle, but it’s crucial.
If you let employees just feed you data - ”Hey boss, I’m 10% done... 20% done... 50% done” - they’re not taking accountability for delivering the result. They’re just reporting progress, which means you’re the one ultimately accountable.
By asking if they’ll achieve the goal, you leave accountability on their shoulders. They either complete the goal or tell you early that there’s a problem that needs solving. If an employee spends all quarter saying they’ll hit their goal and then doesn’t, you have a clear performance issue.
There are good reasons a goal might not be achieved. But there are very few good reasons someone didn’t know they weren’t going to achieve it.
Now You Can Actually Hold Them Accountable
Only with this system in place can you truly hold an employee accountable. You now know they were hired for the right skills, trained properly, given clear expectations, and given plenty of judgment-free space to communicate about obstacles.
If in this environment they’re regularly missing goals - especially if they’ve been predicting all quarter that they’ll hit them - then a real discussion needs to happen.
What factors were in their control? Which weren’t?
What needs to change?
Is this about external conditions or the employee?
The main thing I want to communicate here is that so many managers (CEOs included) jump straight to the accountability conversation without laying this foundation. That’s unfair to the employee and to the organization.
By taking time to…
hire thoughtfully
train with focus
document responsibilities and goals
do predictive weekly check-ins
…you vastly increase the person’s chances of making a meaningful contribution to your company’s results.
That works a hell of a lot better than hire → hope → retaliate.
Brillaint breakdown of what real accountability looks like. The shift from progress reports to predictive check-ins is kinda genius because it forces ownership before things go sideways. I've seen teams get way more proactive when they have to predict outcomes weekly ratehr than just update status. That subtle framing change transforms the whole dynamic from reporting to problem-solving.