Accountable Leaders

CHAPTER 3How to Think About Leadership Accountability

If you and I met, one of the things you would immediately notice is that I always have a notebook with me. I’m always jotting down notes—from meetings with clients, internal meetings with my teams, and my latest aha moments. I also keep notes digitally, but my physical notebook is my go-to device. I keep all my notebooks, and when I started to conduct my research for this book, I realized that I had 15 years’ worth of notebooks. As I dug into them and read each one, I discovered that I had, on average, two meetings per week with leaders from companies all over the world—that is almost 1,500 meetings in total. When I distilled the insights from these notes, it became clear to me how everything led up to my thinking about why leadership accountability matters. In the next section, I will briefly describe what I have learned from all those meetings and client projects, and how over time they’ve helped form the core ideas of my life’s work.

The Timeline of Leadership Challenges

After analyzing my notes, I immediately saw how leadership challenges evolved and changed over time. There were five broad themes that surfaced (see Figure 3.1). Let’s explore each of them in more detail.

Figure 3.1 The Timeline of Leadership Challenges

1. Leadership Becomes a Business Issue

For many years, one of the challenges I repeatedly saw ...