The dashboards went up in March. Six screens, refreshed hourly, every team’s numbers visible to every other team.
It had taken four months and a consultant to build, and the logic was sound: people can’t own what they can’t see. Make performance visible and ownership follows.
Eighteen months later, the numbers were almost exactly where they’d started.
(A composite. The pattern is real; the company isn’t.)
What visibility actually produced
Not nothing. It produced fluency.
The team got very good at explaining their numbers. Genuinely good — sophisticated, specific, well-evidenced accounts of why the figure was what it was. Seasonality. Lead quality. A vendor delay in the second week. An unusually heavy volume of one account type.
None of those explanations were false. That is the part that makes this hard to see from the inside. Every one of them was accurate, and every one of them located the cause somewhere the speaker wasn’t.
A person can look directly at a number they feel no responsibility for, every day, forever. The screen doesn’t change that. It just gives them something to explain.
Willingness, not visibility
Accountability is the willingness to accept responsibility for your actions and their outcomes. Willingness is the whole word. Not compliance, not exposure, not measurement.
And willingness is downstream of trust, which is why this is pillar three and not pillar one. On a team that doesn’t trust its leader, a visible number is not an invitation to own something — it’s evidence that could be used later. The rational response to evidence is a good explanation, and that is precisely what the company got.
They hadn’t built an accountability system. They’d built a very expensive prompt for better excuses.
The two changes that moved it
They added one input to every review. Not instead of the outcome — alongside it. Revenue stayed on the screen; alongside it went a number the person could have changed yesterday. Outcomes are lagging and shared. Inputs are immediate and personal, and there is nowhere outside yourself to point.
The leader went first, every time. Before asking anyone to account for a result, he spent two minutes on what he had or hadn’t done that contributed — the decision he’d postponed, the hire he’d slow-walked, the process he’d known was broken since spring.
The second one did more than the first, and it cost nothing.
Willingness is contagious in exactly one direction. It travels down from whoever demonstrates it first, and a team will not accept accountability from a leader who has not. That isn’t a motivational sentiment. It’s just how fast people read the difference between someone who inspects everything except their own performance and someone who doesn’t.
Where to start this week
Add one leading measure. One. Something a person could have done differently yesterday.
Take two minutes first. In your next review, open with your own contribution to the result before anyone else speaks.
Listen for direction, not content. When results come up, notice who reaches first for causes outside themselves. Both kinds of explanation can be true. The habitual direction tells you where the willingness is.
More on this is in Chapter 3 — Architecting Sustainability of Firm Foundations. See also Keyword: Willingness.
Working on this with a real team and want a second set of eyes? Start a conversation, or book a 30-minute call. No pitch — just a look at what you are actually dealing with.
Leave a Reply