3 Ways to Compassionately Hold Your Team Accountable

June 12, 2024

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Summary. Why are some teams more successful than others when it comes to meeting deadlines, hitting targets, and growing revenues? Researchers at the NeuroLeadership Institute looked at the cognitive processes associated with leaders who cultivate accountability...m

Leaders have always had to balance compassion and accountability — and in recent years, we’ve seen the pendulum swing wildly in both directions. During the early years of the pandemic, many organizations made their people a priority, offering flexibility, mental health benefits, and other support to help employees navigate a stressful time. Recently, as interest rates and inflation have risen, we’ve seen leaders change their tune, dialing back on some benefits, bringing people back to the office, and placing more emphasis on results: meeting deadlines, hitting targets, and growing revenues.

This situation has left employees, managers, and executives wondering: Is it possible to create accountability without the whiplash, in a way that makes people feel like their needs still matter? Does it have to be a binary issue of care versus results? And what are the most effective ways of creating accountability across all levels of an organization?

At the NeuroLeadership Institute, we believe the answers to these questions can be found through understanding the cognitive processes involved in accountability. Over the past year, we’ve been researching what goes on in the brain of a person who is truly accountable for the goals they undertake.

By understanding the cognitive habits at the core of a healthy approach to accountability, we can develop evidence-based habit activation strategies that are more targeted and focused. We can go from making accountability a much-talked-about priority to a rich component of an organization’s culture.

The Science of Accountability

It turns out, people perceive accountability in one of two ways — and which type leaders cultivate will determine how their teams perform.

Threatening: Punitive accountability, the kind most leaders typically think of and practice, involves reprimanding people for mistakes and failures, creating a culture of threat and blame.
Worthy challenge: Accountability perceived as a worthy challenge views taking ownership of a task as an opportunity for growth, and sees missteps as chances to improve.

Leaders should strive for the second type of accountability, as there is now significant research suggesting that encouraging a growth mindset accelerates individual performance, learning and adaptability, and overall well-being. And because growth-oriented accountability rewards employees for taking risks and encourages a growth mindset, it has knock-on benefits for team culture. In particular, it compels people to find solutions to the mistakes others have made rather than blaming or shaming them.

Viewing accountability as a worthy challenge is empowering in that it’s an “opt-in” approach. While punitive accountability holds people accountable, this second type of accountability lets people choose to be accountable. Because employees can see there are benefits to learning and growing while taking ownership of their work, they feel more personally invested in accepting important challenges.

3 Habits That Build Accountability

The core of our research has involved identifying the mental muscles — what’s going on inside people’s heads — when they’re practicing the non-punitive type of accountability. These muscles show up as three distinct but connected habits: thinking ahead, owning your commitments, and anchoring on solutions.

When anyone practices these habits, they deliver better results. When leaders practice these habits, they’re able to set clearer expectations, anticipate a variety of outcomes, and keep team members in the right mindset so they can focus on getting better rather than being perfect.

Think ahead.

Accountability occurs when leaders can mentalize what’s likely to happen when they give someone a task or directive — that is, create a mental image of the task and communicate it in a way that ensures shared understanding. The more richly a leader can paint a picture for themselves of how they’d like the job done and what obstacles the person may encounter, the easier it will be to communicate that vision to the employee.

For instance, before a big pitch meeting, a VP of sales may tell a junior salesperson that the client likes to interrupt and ask many questions. The VP instructs the salesperson to come prepared to field these questions. They may even role play the scenario so the VP can give pointers to the salesperson on how to get back on script under pressure.

A leader less concerned with results might be more hands off, essentially hoping the employee’s talents will allow them to close the deal. But by thinking ahead, the leader can mentalize how the scenario might play out, anticipate obstacles, and increase their employee’s chance of success according to a predetermined strategy.

By going through this exercise, leaders can help create a mental picture in their employee’s mind of what success looks like. This will create stronger activation of the employee’s prefrontal cortex (PFC) — that large brain region right behind your forehead that’s in charge of major executive functions — as well as other brain areas that process our senses, emotions, and memories. The clearer leaders can be, the easier it will be for employees to turn intentions into the appropriate actions.

The challenge involves understanding another person’s perspective — what questions they may have, obstacles that could arise for them, and their own unique strengths and challenges. It turns out there are many traps to perspective taking, one being that we often end up accidentally projecting our own perspective onto other people. However, we believe with the right framing and a little training, people can meaningfully improve in their ability to think ahead, both as leaders giving out tasks and as individuals accepting them.

Own your commitments.

The second habit of accountability is following through on commitments. We believe that owning your commitments is both a learnable skill and one that is unconsciously learned from others. Because we unconsciously track the people who keep their promises and those who don’t, someone who is fastidious about executing on promises — large and small — can become a person others trust deeply. Such trust has a huge impact on everyone’s ability to collaborate well.

But when employees are told to do one thing and see their leaders doing another, the mismatched expectations can register as a threat, sapping their motivation through a drop in dopamine. The brain must divert precious energy away from focusing on key tasks to process the error that violated our expectations. Unmet commitments usually lead to new, lower expectations of the leader.

Let’s say a leader sets a firm deadline for the team around a big department-wide project but can’t meet the deadline for their portion of the work. In addition to lowering expectations for themselves, the leader risks creating a fairness threat that could cause employees to shirk future deadlines and disengage from important projects. If, instead, the leader had owned their commitments, they would have prioritized ahead of time and met their deadline, reinforcing for their team the importance of staying accountable.

Anchor on solutions.

Lastly, accountability is all about growth. When stakes are high, failures are bound to happen. What matters most is that leaders respond to those failures with an impulse toward learning, not punishment. This approach is a hallmark of a growth mindset, and it requires a climate of psychological safety that enables people to admit their mistakes.

Let’s say someone makes a mistake that causes sales numbers to be wrong. A leader who cultivates punitive accountability might blame the person who made the mistake and force them to work all night to fix the error. This, in turn, may lead team members to start blaming each other for fear of being “held accountable.”

Non-punitive accountability seeks to embed a sense of grace in these moments. Everyone makes mistakes, so everyone has a stake in fixing them — and then getting better next time. In the above example, a leader who practices this type of accountability might bring the team together and ask: What actions will move the project forward? Perhaps others will volunteer to work an extra hour to help the team meet the deadline.

Anchoring on solutions means letting go of blame and working to make things better. It means debriefing deeply on both wins and failures, and constantly seeking creative ways of solving problems instead of reasons for failure. Like owning your commitments, anchoring on solutions is a learnable skill that is heavily influenced by the actions of others around us. Therefore, leaders need to be intentional about focusing on the way forward, not on finding out whose fault it is.

Growing While Performing

Accountability may seem like a dirty word, as if results and collegiality can’t coexist. But in healthy cultures, leaders are clear about what they expect out of their team and the role they play in that process. They mentalize how things could go wrong and get ahead of those obstacles. And they keep the team focused on outcomes, not punishments for mistakes.

Teams that engage in these habits are better equipped to be firm and candid with one another because each team member feels safe and secure about their standing in the group. There is less pressure, in other words, to uphold a culture of niceness because each member trusts in their value.

When leaders build the right habits — thinking ahead, owning their commitments, and anchoring on solutions — they’ll find the balancing act of accountability considers individual needs while still ensuring the job gets done.

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DRDavid Rock is a cofounder of the NeuroLeadership Institute and author of Your Brain at Work.
Emma Sarro, PhD, is the senior director of research at the NeuroLeadership Institute. Before joining NLI, Emma was a tenured professor of biology and neuroscience at Dominican College in New York and taught at New York University, She received her BS in human biology from Brown University and PhD in neuroscience from the Center for Neural Science at New York University.
Chris Weller is a veteran writer, editor, and storyteller whose work appears in The Atlantic, Newsweek, Harvard Business Review, Business Insider, Fast Company, and more. He is the co-creator of the 2020 Netflix documentary Spelling the Dream and the founder of 1-Across, a ghostwriting and editing services firm for executives, entrepreneurs, and other thought leaders who want to change how people see the world.