Building accountability during fast-paced change

One of the challenges for leaders navigating organisational change is the way change erodes the conditions that make it possible to hold people to account. The processes that make accountability work in stable environments - clear roles, predictable timelines, shared visibility on progress - are precisely the things that come under pressure when an organisation is moving fast.

Gallup's 2026 workforce research, drawing on surveys of more than 23,000 employed adults, found that creating accountability ranks last among seven core leadership competencies - rated as the weakest area by both leaders assessing themselves and by the managers who report to them. Fewer than half of leaders rated themselves as outstanding or exceptional at holding their teams responsible for delivering strong performance. Their managers rated them even lower: only around 30% of managers assessed their own leaders as highly competent in this area.

There is a direct line between this and engagement. Gallup's data shows that managers who view their leaders as genuinely strong on accountability are three times more likely to be engaged at work. And among the twelve elements of employee engagement that Gallup tracks, clarity of expectations has seen one of the steepest declines in recent years: only 46% of employees now clearly know what is expected of them, down from 56% in 2020. In an environment of constant change, that figure is unlikely to recover on its own.

What is happening to accountability

When accountability breaks down in a fast-moving organisation, it erodes gradually, through a combination of dynamics that each feels individually reasonable but which compound into something genuinely costly - for performance, for trust, and for your own ability to lead effectively.

When your strategy is evolving, role boundaries shift with it. Responsibilities that were clearly assigned become shared or contested as priorities change. People adapt - as they should - but without an explicit reset, no one is quite sure what they still own and what has migrated elsewhere. People stop being clear on what is theirs to deliver, and you lose the ability to have a meaningful conversation about it because neither side is standing on firm ground.

Accountability depends on you having a clear enough picture of what your people are working on, what they have committed to, and whether they are making progress. In periods of intense change, that picture blurs. Your team becomes focused on their own workstreams. Communication becomes more reactive and less structured. The shared view of collective progress that makes accountability functional starts to fragment - and with it, your ability to spot problems early enough to address them.

Rebuilding accountability

Rebuilding accountability means being more deliberate than you might otherwise need to be about a small number of things that make a difference.

• Make the distinction between commitments and plans - Plans change, that is inevitable and appropriate when the context is shifting. But commitments don't need to change as readily, and treating them as if they do is one of the main ways accountability silently erodes. When a commitment can no longer be met as originally understood, the response that preserves accountability is an explicit conversation: what has changed, what is now realistic, and what is being agreed to instead.

• Keep ownership answered, even when the answer is provisional - When roles and structures are shifting, the temptation is to defer the question of who owns what until things settle. An explicit provisional assignment is far healthier than the ambiguity that fills the space when you avoid the question. Ambiguity does not neutrally hold the space - it actively enables people to sidestep accountability without either of you quite acknowledging it.

• Have the conversations you are deferring - One of the most reliable indicators of accountability breaking down in a team is the accumulation of conversations that haven't been had: the performance issue noted but not addressed, the commitment that quietly dropped off without being revisited, the team member whose standards have drifted but who hasn't heard that yet. In a period of significant change, it is easy for these conversations to get postponed further. But the cost accumulates. And the longer the conversation is deferred, the harder it becomes to have it in a way that is fair to the person on the receiving end.

• Separate accountability from blame - Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety, developed over two decades at Harvard Business School, is instructive here. Her framework identifies that teams perform at their highest not when accountability is absent, but when high standards and psychological safety coexist. Without psychological safety, accountability becomes experienced as a threat: people manage information rather than share it, surface problems late rather than early, and protect their own position rather than take ownership.  The distinction between accountability - which is about ownership, honesty, and the intention to act -  and blame, which is a judgement about fault, needs to be demonstrated in your responses, not just stated in a team meeting.

The principles are not complicated. What makes them difficult is that applying them consistently requires something most leaders find genuinely challenging: the willingness to have direct conversations about performance and ownership at precisely the moment when you have the least time, the most pressure, and the strongest incentive to let things slide.

Gallup's research points to one reason why this is so persistent: across six of the seven competencies measured, leaders consistently rate themselves at least 20 percentage points higher than their managers rate them. Understanding which personal patterns are most likely to shape your own behaviour in periods of change is worth the reflection: whether that is conflict avoidance, the tendency to maintain momentum at the expense of candour, or a preference for keeping things positive even when the situation calls for directness.

Accountability is not something your team either has or doesn't have. It is something you build continuously, through the quality and consistency of the conversations you are willing to have - particularly the ones that are easiest to avoid.

At Acumen, we work with leaders at all levels on the practical skills and behaviours that make accountability real in conditions of change — from having difficult performance conversations to building the conditions in which people take genuine ownership of their work. To find out more about how we can support you and your organisation, please contact Simon at simon@askacumen.com.