Accountability systems are built to catch failure, which doesn’t produce anyone’s best work. Kyle McDowell is a former Fortune 10 executive who spent nearly three decades running large teams and billion-dollar operations.
He makes the case that most of what companies call an accountability problem is a leadership problem by another name. Ownership is what drives performance, and people take it on only when their leader gives them a reason.
I once asked a client with a $10 million payroll what he figured the discretionary effort of his average employee was. He said 60%, which, as a simple illustration, meant a $10 million annual payroll buying roughly $6 million worth of work. I asked how fast he’d move if someone were embezzling $4 million a year from him. Same day, he said. Nobody had ever told him the shortfall was a number he could look at.
To his credit, he put the same question to his frontline supervisors that afternoon. They said 35% to 40%. That gap is one worth taking apart. McDowell watched it form inside very large companies, where talented people end up “focused on doing just enough to stay out of trouble instead of doing their best work.”
What’s the Difference Between Accountability and Ownership?
McDowell doesn’t believe a leader can create accountability, and he’ll tell you the word has been ruined by how bosses use it. Most of them confuse it with punishment, so the whole apparatus ends up pointing at people instead of equipping them. “Accountability is not about catching people doing something wrong.” It’s about setting expectations clearly enough that a person can tell whether he hit the mark.
His example is a barista in a small coffee shop, a job that appears to offer little room for ownership. You can take the order, fill the cup, slide it across the counter and be fully compliant with every expectation the role carries. You can also decide to have some effect on the person’s day. The difference between those two versions of the same eight hours isn’t effort. It’s having a reason to care beyond the task itself. Strong performers want that reason badly enough to go hunting for it in a job that appears to offer none.
No leader can install ownership, schedule it, or write it into a performance improvement plan. It’s something people pick up on their own. The only lever available is the environment, and the leader owns that lever whether or not he admits it.
Why Can Every Employee Do the Job Perfectly and Still Fail the Guest?
Last month I spent a day in 100-degree heat getting a house in Kansas ready to sell. By dinner I wanted a real meal, so I picked a Mexican restaurant at roughly twice the price of the less expensive restaurants nearby. Every employee did the job right. The host seated me fast, the server checked on me every 15 minutes, the food was excellent, and the tables were spotless.
I was dehydrated, so my water was gone in about a minute. The empty glass then sat at the edge of my table for five to seven minutes. At least five employees walked past it, some of them twice, until I gave up and got a refill at the bar myself. I sat back down, drank that one, and made the same trip again.
Every one of them executed tasks perfectly and the team still failed. Nobody owned the guest experience, only a slice of it. Their identity was wired to a job description and they all chose to stay in their lanes.
The same failure runs at far larger scale inside big companies. Functional silos can each perform well against their own metrics while the overall customer experience remains mediocre. One area takes real pride in its numbers and has no idea what’s happening two functions over.
One of McDowell’s “Begin With We” principles mentioned in his book is, “We take action.” He sets the bar low on purpose: taking action doesn’t mean doing someone else’s job. In the example I just gave about the Mexican restaurant, it means the bartender could have told the server that the guests at table seven have been without drinks for a while. If that expectation doesn’t exist, something else fills the gap: “Not my job, man.”
Culture Starts With Identity, Not a Values Statement
The 10 principles McDowell built his book around didn’t begin as principles. They began in a hotel room in Lawrence, Kansas, the night before he had to stand in front of the top 40 or 50 leaders of a 15,000-person organization he’d joined weeks earlier.
What he worked through that night was a question of company identity. He ran through the leaders who had made his first 20 years miserable and decided, “That’s not who we’re going to be.” He ran through the handful who saw more in him than he saw in himself and decided, “That’s exactly who we’re going to be.”
Behaviors came afterward, as a way to describe a team he had already chosen to build. A company that writes the values first and hopes an identity forms around them has the order backward. Everyone inside can feel it.
That’s another one of McDowell’s principles, “We lead by example.” He frames it as a question with no opt-out. The question isn’t whether you’re leading by example. It’s whether you’re leading by one you’d be proud to see copied. He’s blunt about why the poster in the lobby never worked. “Nobody cares about the values on the wall.”
Employees watch behavior instead, checking whether you’re a hypocrite. The moment that counts most is the one where you break your own standard and say so out loud.
What Should You Do First When You Inherit an Underperforming Team?
Within his first month at that same 15,000-person company, McDowell’s boss named two people on his team who needed to go. New leaders almost always comply, since pleasing the boss is the fastest win available. Swinging a sledgehammer photographs well as decisiveness. McDowell’s question was one nobody asked: why were these two still on the payroll for him to deal with if they were that bad?
His sequence is change the environment before changing the people. Listen first, ask fewer questions than you want to, and observe. Set the standards everyone will operate by, the leader included, before saying a word about the metrics.
Then go get some quick wins and publicize them, because a team known for low morale already knows what it’s known for. “People don’t need promises. They need evidence that you’re not just there to supervise. You’re there to actually lead.”
Some people do have to go. McDowell isn’t sentimental about that. What he insists on is sequence, meaning the decision comes after you understand why the numbers sit where they sit. People who look like they don’t care have usually been taught that caring bought them nothing, and somebody in the building did the teaching.
Are You Rewarding Outcomes or Theater?
Another one of his principles reads “We measure ourselves by outcomes, not activity.” The tell is a calendar packed back to back, double-booked five times. “People wear that busyness as a badge of honor.” Activity matters, though only when you can draw a straight line from it to an outcome somebody owns. Where that line can’t be drawn, the activity has earned scrutiny rather than applause.
The second tell is harder to see and worse news. When the people who used to push back go quiet and meetings start producing broad agreement with whatever the boss said, the incentive structure has been teaching a lesson. Looking productive pays better than delivering. A company has started buying theater. Nobody is arguing against hard work here, only hard work aimed at the wrong things.
The Question That Cost Him a Promotion
In 2009, McDowell was running an organization of about 5,000 people when a peer left the company. McDowell’s boss asked him to absorb the departing peer’s group on top of his own. Roughly a month later, the boss left too, which put his job on the market. By then, McDowell was running two of the three groups that job covered, and he considered himself the obvious successor. He interviewed for it and didn’t get it.
In his next one-on-one, he asked the division president why. The answer came back in five words: “You never asked for help.” The inherited function was underperforming in a domain he barely knew. He had never raised his hand for resources, expertise, or anything else, because he thought owning it meant carrying it alone.
That’s the one piece of advice he’d give if he could give only one. It costs so much because the instinct running against it feels like professionalism. Executives learn early that the room rewards whoever seems to have the answer. The person who could most afford to say “I don’t know” is the one who never says it. The team that most needs to hear it never does.
A leader who asks for help in front of his team is doing something more valuable than solving his own problem. He’s showing everyone below him what’s permitted. The cost of not asking for help extends beyond a missed promotion. It’s an organization where nobody else asks either.
“People wear that busyness as a badge of honor.”