2 Leadership Experts on How to Create a Culture of Accountability

At ConantLeadership’s recent BLUEPRINT Leadership Summit—a virtual meeting of the top minds in leadership—Dr. Vince Molinaro (CEO of Leadership Contract Inc. and bestselling author of Accountable Leaders, The Leadership Contract, and the forthcoming Community of Leaders) spoke with Doug Conant (founder of ConantLeadership, former CEO of Campbell Soup Company, and bestselling author of The Blueprint and TouchPoints) about how to create a culture of accountability in a challenging landscape.

Enjoy the following tips and takeaways from their conversation in the recap below. You can also watch the recording of their discussion (skip to roughly minute 5 to skip intros and housekeeping).

Accountability Starts with a Deep Sense of Ownership

Dr. Vince Molinaro says all accountable leaders have one thing in common: A deep sense of ownership. Through his work with Leadership Contract Inc., solving the complex challenges that hold organizations back, he’s found that leaders who successfully inspire cultures of accountability always start by addressing their own behavior first.

Molinaro says accountable leaders innately understand “the weight of the position” and know that they must “create enduring value” for all stakeholders. The effect is twofold: Accountable leadership is rooted in a profound feeling of responsibility for the role of leading people as well as “a sense of urgency” to propel the organization forward.

Some say you can only have one or the other: A focus on honoring people or a focus on accountability. But Doug Conant, who’s worked with leaders across the globe and served as a President and CEO in the Fortune 500, believes that you must have both. He says that accountability is essential to building the “kind and caring organizations” needed in today’s precarious landscape. And he adds that empathetic leaders “can only thrive if there’s a powerful sense of accountability to deliver the required performance for the enterprise.” It’s precisely how Conant led a ten-year turnaround of Campbell Soup Company—by being both “tough-minded on standards and tender-hearted with people.”

In alignment with these twin goals of tough-mindedness and tender-heartedness, Molinaro’s book, The Leadership Contract, brings the fine print of leadership into focus: To step up to the challenge, leaders must accept what they’ve signed up for and embrace the depth of their impact on others.

Molinaro offers a key clarification. He observes that some leaders tend to make “a tough job harder for themselves” because “they confuse being tough with being rough.” The opposite is true. His research shows that a “macho view of leadership” continues to plague many organizations, causing sub-optimal outcomes—partly due to the outdated belief that when leaders don’t succeed, it’s because they aren’t brash enough or don’t have what it takes.

Research tells a different story, pointing to a lack of training as the cause of leadership failure, rather than a lack of laddish ruthlessness. Molinaro and his team surveyed more than 4,000 managers in 2023. A whopping 82% defined themselves as “accidental managers” and said they were moved into their role without any leadership development or training. He grimly observes the long-odds of this kind of gamble: “Some will figure it out, but most don’t.” Leaders need support to thrive.

“Accountability all comes back to building community.”

Tap Into the Expertise of the People around You

Leaving leaders to fend for themselves is an unnecessarily risky move. So both panelists have made it their mission to empower leaders with the tools for performance and mindset transformation—from the inside out. Conant often describes leadership as walking “on sacred ground,” and says we should offer leaders skills-training commensurate with a hallowed duty. Molinaro agrees and reiterates that it starts with a mindset that acknowledges the importance of the role: Whether or not expectations are clear, “you signed up for something really important,” and important pursuits require practice and training.

Molinaro reminds us that leaders “are there to leave things in better shape than we found it,” and must avoid what Conant calls the “seat-of-the-pants” style of leadership that often occurs in the absence of formal training and development.

If you too find yourself an “accidental manager” and want to take ownership of your growth, Dr. Molinaro recommends working on three critical skills:

1. The ability to be deliberate
2. The ability to understand the context of your role and how to extrapolate expectations
3. The ability to set a personal tone of accountability and then scale accountability among your team

Of the three, Dr. Molinaro considers setting a personal tone of accountability to be “the fastest way to become a better manager or a better leader.” His book, Accountable Leaders, explains what this looks like in practice. One critical suggestion is to tap into the broad experience and expertise of the people around you. In other words, “be a community builder.” Show that you value other voices and insight. Otherwise, Conant adds, you risk losing trust: “You can’t expect the associates in your organization to value your agenda as a leader until they believe you value their agenda as a contributor.”

This matches well with research firm Gartner’s findings that employees need more agency and purpose at work. It’s that sense of shared ownership that can inspire a renewed culture of accountability and strengthen teamwork. Molinaro offers this encouragement for leaders: “You don’t have to push through a problem . . . Someone will either have gone through it before or has a perspective that will help you solve it more effectively.”

As the saying goes, “many hands make light work,” so it’s wise to ask for input and advice. And while a leader’s work may never be “light” in the traditional sense, building collaborative relationships with colleagues offers a reprieve from carrying all the weight.

Have Patience with the Process

Conant returns to Molinaro’s advice to “be deliberate,” and highlights that being successful in this area “implies that you’ve created a framework for yourself that you can be deliberate with.” He explains that, to be accountable, you need to know what you’re being held accountable for—and you need words for people to measure your behavior against. This requires an abundance of clarity and purpose—both of which are focal points in Conant’s book, The Blueprint, which helps leaders articulate how they want to show up at work.

Conant’s advice is clear: You must do the work to know who you are, what you believe, and how you want to lead so you can then express that to others. Without this kind of thoughtful approach, the complexity of today’s organizational landscape can stymie even the best laid plans.

Both panelists speak to this complexity using the example of today’s “matrix world.” Molinaro says most employees now sit on “anywhere from five to eight different teams” and many are in separate physical locations. The intricacy doesn’t stop there: “The entire value chain has these interdependencies built into them,” Conant says, so leaders must “be prepared to think beyond the four walls of your team.”

Navigating this matrix comes with key to-dos like the three skills Molinaro shared earlier in the session—and it also comes with some don’t-dos, or “watch outs,” as Conant calls them. His first “watch out” regards pacing: “Have patience with the process,” and understand that not everything will go smoothly right away; you need time to earn buy-in.  Molinaro agrees, and says it’s essential to remember that the people you work with are “whole human beings” with lives beyond their job title. Building accountable teams requires a focus on shared humanity.

Molinaro says the second “watch out” is to not use hybrid or remote work as “an excuse as to why you can’t lead.” It requires an adaptive approach, but leaders can absolutely build relationships and accountability virtually, as long as they are willing to learn and grow.

Molinaro’s third “watch out” is to not shy away from giving candid feedback, especially as a response to poor performance, a topic he writes about at length in The Leadership Contract Field Guide. Molinaro encourages leaders to have “a sense of resilience and resolve” to show people their blind spots in a way that comes “from a place of caring.” And it’s not only true for hard feedback; positive feedback is equally important. Taking the time to share your appreciation—whether verbally or in writing—goes a long way.

Conant builds on this and says that the ability to give difficult feedback or make hard-nosed calls starts well before you ever need to take action: “You build the emotional bank account with the organization so that when you do make a tough call for the right reason, everybody’s going to say, ‘I understand,’” because you’ve already built a foundation of trust and good will. Ultimately, when you have the courage to avoid all three don’t-dos, “you strengthen your team, you strengthen your organization, and you strengthen yourself,” says Molinaro.

“You must do the work to know who you are, what you believe, and how you want to lead.”

Recognize the Leaders You Might Be Overlooking

Part of building an emotional bank account requires honoring people at every level of the organization. Molinaro and Conant use executive assistants (EAs), who they say are chronically undervalued members of the leadership team, as a prime example.

Both panelists say administrative professionals are crucial to leadership success and that when their vast capacity to contribute is acknowledged and developed, these professionals can amplify effectiveness across the organization with impressive diplomacy and discernment. “The conditions for excellence in execution are not formed by the leader themselves. They’re formed by the team. And your core team as a CEO is that administrative assistant,” says Conant.

It’s a concept Molinaro understands well given his extensive work advising CEOs. In his Forbes article, “The Executive Assistant: The Unsung Leader at Every Great CEO’s Right Hand,” he explains the unique leadership attributes of exceptional executive assistants—including discretion and adaptability. He writes that the EA role “yields a different kind of power,” and that they “are the linchpins that ensure the organizational machine runs smoothly.” Again, accountability reigns supreme. Leaders must hold themselves accountable for recognizing and rewarding people at all levels of the company, including the administrative professionals who keep things moving.

Abandoning what Molinaro calls the “traditional secretarial mold,” and recognizing executive assistants as leaders in their own right is a shining example of how leaders should be thinking about all their employees from the associate level to the C-suite. Both panelists urge leaders to be deliberate about valuing the leadership capacity of everyone on their team, especially the people who might otherwise be overlooked.

Molinaro says accountability all comes back to building community: “I really feel that [community] is the antidote to some of the challenges we’re facing around culture, around engagement.” And he’s putting his money where his mouth is. In Molinaro’s forthcoming book, Community of Leaders, he examines how to drive strategy, culture, and change through a collaborative model of  leadership. To close out the session, he leaves leaders with a final thought: “It’s all about accountability and community. If you focus there, it will accelerate your impact as a leader,” and the culture will follow.

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Enjoyed these insights?

Watch the full recording of this interview to get more details, including insights from an audience Q&A. You can also access the complete inventory of previous BLUEPRINT Leadership Summit sessions, including illuminating conversations with Brené Brown, Susan Cain, Indra Nooyi, Amy Edmondson, Bill George, Barbara Humpton,and many more.

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About the Author: Vanessa Bradford is a freelance content writer and copywriter, and C3PR’s Content Marketing Director.

(Header photo by Matteo Vistocco on Unsplash)