Accountable Leaders

CHAPTER 12Do the Hard Work to Sustain Momentum

The third term of the leadership contract states that leadership is hard work and leaders need to be tough and have the resilience and resolve to tackle it. If they don’t, it will undermine their efforts to be accountable leaders. The same idea applies to organizations. Many organizations make leadership accountability a business priority. They may also invest time to define and embed a clear set of leadership expectations for leaders. Sustaining all this effort takes dedicated focus. Much of it involves hard work. Unfortunately, just like individual leaders, many organizations avoid this hard work. As we already explored earlier in this book, my global research found that only 20 percent of organizations deal with the leaders seen to be unaccountable and mediocre. This is not acceptable in my opinion. Avoiding this hard work undermines all efforts to build strong leadership accountability and establish a robust leadership culture.

This chapter will focus on the four strategies that must be tackled to sustain strong leadership accountability (see Figure 12.1).

Figure 12.1 The Hard Work Needed to Sustain Strong Leadership Accountability

Demonstrate Zero Tolerance for Bad and Abusive Leadership Behavior

The global consulting firm PwC has done quite a bit of research over the years on the reasons why companies fire their CEOs. ...