How leaders can address mistakes, hold people responsible, and improve the systems that allowed problems to happen.
A customer calls because the service they booked isn’t what they expected. The information on the appointment is incomplete, the person scheduled to perform the work is frustrated, and someone now has to figure out how to make things right. It doesn’t take long for the questions to begin. Who booked the appointment? Why didn’t they enter the correct information? Who should have caught the mistake?
Those are reasonable things to investigate. We need to understand where the error occurred, who was involved, and what needs to be corrected. The problem begins when finding the person responsible becomes more important than understanding what actually happened.
I’ve seen how quickly conversations about accountability can turn into conversations about blame. A mistake creates frustration, people begin defending their decisions, and before long, everyone is explaining why the problem belongs somewhere else. The original issue may eventually get resolved, but we haven’t necessarily learned anything that will prevent it from happening again. We may even have made the next problem harder to uncover because people have learned that admitting a mistake means putting themselves in the line of fire.
This is why I believe the distinction between accountability and blame matters so much in leadership. Both may begin with the same mistake, but they lead us in very different directions. Blame looks for somewhere to place the problem. Accountability asks us to understand what happened, recognize the responsibility that belongs to each person, and make sure something changes because of it.
That doesn’t mean avoiding consequences or making excuses for poor performance. It means taking responsibility seriously enough to look beyond the first person we can identify.
Accountability vs. Blame: Why the Difference Matters
When something goes wrong, leaders are often under pressure to respond quickly. A customer needs an answer, work needs to be rescheduled, or another department is waiting for a resolution. We don’t always have the luxury of spending an afternoon examining every detail before taking action, and I understand the desire to identify who made the mistake and move on. It feels decisive. Someone owns the problem, we address it with them, and everyone can get back to work.
But identifying the person who made the final error doesn’t always explain why the error happened.
Consider an employee who enters incomplete information while scheduling a service. Perhaps they rushed through the booking, overlooked a required field, or failed to ask the customer an important question. Those decisions matter, and the employee may need coaching or corrective action. If the expectation was clear and they knowingly skipped a required step, we shouldn’t pretend otherwise.
But what if the scheduling process doesn’t clearly identify which information is required? What if employees are trained one way but evaluated primarily on how many appointments they book? What if the same mistake has occurred repeatedly, yet no one has examined why?
We can hold the employee accountable for their choices and still recognize that the system may be contributing to the problem. In fact, I would argue that we have a responsibility to examine both. If we only address the individual, we may correct one person’s behavior while leaving the conditions that contributed to the mistake untouched.
I’ve found that leaders sometimes resist examining the process because they’re concerned it will sound like an excuse. If we acknowledge unclear instructions or poor training, are we letting the employee off the hook? I don’t think so. If someone knowingly ignores a clear expectation, that needs to be addressed. If the expectation itself was never clear, that also needs to be addressed. We don’t have to choose one explanation simply because it’s easier to manage.
The goal is to understand the responsibility that belongs in each place. Blame tends to end the conversation once someone has been identified, while accountability should leave us with a clearer understanding of what needs to happen next.
When Accountability Starts to Feel Like Punishment
Think about what happens when a leader’s first response to every mistake is frustration. Someone brings up a problem, and the conversation immediately turns toward who failed, why they should have known better, and how disappointed the leader is. Perhaps the employee is criticized in front of others, or the issue becomes a discussion about their attitude before anyone has established the facts.
What do people learn from that experience?
They may become more careful, but not necessarily in the way we want. Instead of becoming more attentive to the work, they become more attentive to protecting themselves. They hesitate to raise concerns because they don’t want to be associated with the problem. They spend time explaining why something wasn’t their responsibility or wait until they have a solution before telling anyone there’s an issue, even when an earlier warning would have allowed the team to prevent it.
A leader can create that environment without intending to. We may believe we’re demonstrating how seriously we take performance, while the team is learning that admitting a mistake is dangerous. The next time something goes wrong, people may spend their energy preparing a defense instead of helping us understand the problem.
This is where psychological safety and accountability need to work together. People should be able to acknowledge an error, raise a concern, or disagree with a decision without being humiliated for doing so. That doesn’t mean their actions are free from consequences. It means the response should be based on what happened and what responsibility belongs to them, rather than the leader’s frustration.
I want people to tell me when something has gone wrong, especially when they’re the person who made the mistake. If they believe admitting it will automatically lead to an unfair response, I shouldn’t be surprised when they hesitate. And if I only discover problems after they’ve become too large to ignore, I need to consider whether my own behavior has contributed to that silence.
That doesn’t remove the employee’s responsibility to communicate. It gives me another part of the situation to examine. Accountability should make the truth easier to uncover, not harder.
Look at the Person and the Process
Let’s return to the scheduling mistake. The customer is upset, the field employee has arrived without the information needed to complete the service, and the company now has to decide how to resolve the appointment.
The immediate priority is to take care of the customer and limit the impact. Someone needs to communicate clearly, determine what can be done, and make sure the people involved understand the plan. We can’t allow the customer to sit in the middle of an internal debate about whose responsibility the problem was.
Once the immediate issue is addressed, there’s an opportunity to examine how it happened.
The employee who booked the appointment may have skipped a required step. Perhaps they knew the information was necessary but assumed someone else would collect it later. If that’s the case, there’s a clear performance issue to discuss. We need to understand why they made that decision and establish what must happen differently.
But we also need to understand whether the required information was clearly identified, whether the scheduling system supported the process, and whether previous errors had revealed the same weakness.
Imagine discovering that several employees have made similar mistakes over the past month. Each incident has been corrected individually, and each employee has been reminded to pay closer attention. The reminders may have been appropriate, but the problem continues.
At some point, we have to ask whether another reminder is really the solution.
Maybe the process needs a mandatory field. Maybe the training doesn’t adequately explain why the information matters. Maybe the scheduling team doesn’t understand how an incomplete booking affects the employee performing the service. Or perhaps the process is clear, the training is adequate, and people are repeatedly choosing to ignore it. That would lead to a different response, but we won’t know until we’re willing to investigate.
This is why I don’t believe accountability should be reduced to documenting mistakes. Tracking an error can be useful, particularly when we’re trying to identify patterns, but a record of who made it doesn’t automatically tell us what we’ve learned. If the same problem continues to occur and our response is simply to identify another person who made the mistake, we’re not doing enough.
The individual needs to own their decisions. The leader needs to examine the conditions surrounding those decisions. The organization needs to learn from what keeps happening. Each responsibility matters, and none of them cancels the others.
Leaders Have to Be Willing to Look at Their Own Contribution
It’s much easier to talk about ownership when we’re discussing someone else’s responsibilities. We can recognize when an employee should have communicated earlier, followed a process, or asked for clarification. We’re often less eager to examine the direction we provided, the assumptions we made, or the behavior we’ve allowed to continue.
I’ve come to believe that one of the most important questions a leader can ask after something goes wrong is whether there was something they should have done differently.
Did I make the expectation clear? Did I provide the training or resources needed? Did I recognize a recurring problem and fail to address it? Have I been rewarding one behavior while asking people to prioritize another?
These aren’t questions designed to make every problem the leader’s fault. They’re questions that help us understand our contribution, which is often the part we’re most capable of changing.
This is where Stoicism has been particularly useful in my approach to leadership. The Stoics placed considerable emphasis on examining our own judgments and actions rather than becoming consumed by what other people have done. For me, that means resisting the temptation to begin with someone else’s failure before I’ve considered my own responsibilities.
If I discover that I didn’t provide clear direction, I need to acknowledge it. If I knew a process was creating confusion but never made time to improve it, that belongs to me. If I avoided a difficult conversation until a small performance problem became a larger one, I have something to learn from that decision. Recognizing those things doesn’t mean the employee’s choices disappear. It means I’m applying the same expectation of ownership to myself that I expect from the people I lead.
A leader might say, “I should have made the approval process clearer. That’s something I’ll correct. You also knew this information needed to be confirmed before the appointment was booked, and we need to address why that didn’t happen.”
There’s no contradiction in that conversation. Both people can have responsibility, and both can make changes. In fact, I think accountability becomes more credible when leaders demonstrate that the standard applies to them as well. It’s difficult to ask people to examine their decisions honestly if we consistently explain away our own.
Ownership can’t be something we expect from everyone else while reserving exceptions for ourselves.
Accountability Still Requires Standards and Consequences
There’s another mistake leaders can make when trying to move away from blame. We can become so concerned about creating a supportive environment that we stop addressing poor performance directly. We investigate the process, acknowledge our contribution, and discuss what everyone can learn, but the employee who knowingly ignored an expectation leaves without a clear understanding of what must change.
That isn’t accountability, either.
People deserve clear standards. They need to understand what is expected, how their actions affect others, and what happens when they repeatedly fail to meet those expectations. When we avoid addressing poor performance, we create uncertainty for the person involved and frustration for the people who are consistently meeting the standard.
An honest mistake made by someone who was properly trained may call for coaching and an opportunity to correct it. A recurring problem may require a more structured performance conversation. Deliberately ignoring a known requirement or concealing an error may call for a more serious response. Those situations shouldn’t automatically receive the same treatment because the facts, the person’s choices, their history, and the impact of what happened all matter.
Fair accountability requires us to understand those differences rather than reacting to every mistake with the same level of frustration.
I also think we need to be careful about confusing a person’s actions with their character. There’s a difference between saying someone failed to complete a required review and declaring that they’re careless. One identifies a specific behavior that can be examined and corrected. The other assigns a label that may do little to help the person improve.
A useful performance conversation should leave someone understanding what happened, why it matters, what needs to change, and how that change will be evaluated. If the person disagrees with our assessment, we should be willing to hear their perspective. Listening doesn’t require us to abandon the standard; it helps us make sure we’re applying it fairly.
And once expectations have been established, we need to follow through. A leader who repeatedly addresses the same issue without ensuring anything changes can unintentionally teach the team that the standard is optional. Other employees notice when they consistently meet expectations while someone else is allowed to ignore them.
Accountability has to protect the people doing the work well, too. The purpose isn’t to make consequences frightening. It’s to make responsibility clear and meaningful, so everyone understands that the standards we establish are standards we intend to uphold.
What Happens After the Conversation Matters Most
One of the easiest ways to mistake activity for progress is to believe that a problem has been resolved because we’ve had a conversation about it. We’ve identified the employee, explained the mistake, documented the issue, and reminded everyone of the expectation. The meeting ends, and we move on.
But what actually changed?
If the scheduling process was confusing yesterday, is it clearer today? If an employee didn’t understand the importance of collecting certain information, have we addressed that gap? If someone repeatedly ignored a requirement, is there a clear expectation and a plan to verify improvement? And if the problem was affecting multiple departments, have the people involved worked together to understand the full impact?
These are the questions that turn accountability into improvement. A useful response should address the immediate harm, establish what each person is responsible for changing, and create some way to determine whether the solution worked.
That doesn’t require an elaborate new system for every mistake. Sometimes it means correcting an instruction, improving a checklist, or following up with someone the next week. Other situations may require a more substantial change. What matters is that the response goes beyond identifying who was involved.
I’ve become increasingly interested in what recurring problems tell us about leadership. When the same issue appears again and again, it may reveal something about expectations, communication, training, or follow-through that we’ve failed to recognize.
We should still address each person’s responsibility. But if we’re having the same conversation with different people every month, there’s a good chance we need to examine more than the individuals involved. Otherwise, we may become very good at documenting mistakes without becoming any better at preventing them.
The Standard We Set When Things Go Wrong
People learn what accountability means by experiencing it. They learn from how we respond when a customer complains, when an employee admits an error, or when a department raises a concern about another team’s work.
If our first instinct is to find someone to blame, people may learn to defend themselves before they tell us the truth. If we excuse every mistake without addressing responsibility, they may learn that expectations don’t carry much weight. Neither creates the kind of culture I want to lead.
I want people to know they can raise a problem without being humiliated, that their perspective will be heard, and that the facts will matter. I also want them to understand that ownership includes acknowledging mistakes, correcting what they can, and meeting the standards they’ve agreed to. Those expectations belong together because accountability without honesty becomes a search for someone to punish, while honesty without responsibility leaves us with problems that never get corrected.
The next time something goes wrong, there will probably be pressure to identify who made the mistake. We may need that information, and we may need to have a difficult conversation with the person responsible. But I want to be careful not to confuse finding a person with finding the answer.
A name may tell us where the mistake occurred. It doesn’t necessarily tell us why it happened, what responsibility belongs to the rest of us, or what needs to change. That’s the work of accountability, and it requires more from us than simply deciding who was at fault.
When we’re willing to do that work consistently, we can hold people to meaningful standards while improving the processes and leadership practices that support them. We can address mistakes without making honesty dangerous, and we can expect ownership from others while demonstrating it ourselves.
The measure of accountability isn’t simply whether we identified who made the mistake. It’s whether we addressed the responsibility, corrected what needed to change, and gave ourselves a better chance of preventing the same problem next time.