The Performance Gap: Issue 15

Last week I wrote about trust - specifically the distinction between cognitive and affective trust, and why most team development activity addresses the wrong one. This week a related and under-examined problem: the pattern of accountability that almost every senior team has, and almost none of them talk about.

Most senior teams apply accountability rigorously downward. They apply it almost nowhere else.

Senior leaders who hold their own people to clear standards (who have difficult performance conversations, who follow through on expectations, who do not tolerate persistent underdelivery) are often remarkably tolerant of the same problems at their own level.

Meeting the agreed collective deliverable is someone else's problem. The strategic decision that turned out badly is not revisited. The commitment made publicly and not honoured quietly disappears. Nobody says it directly. But everyone knows.

This is the accountability paradox: the more senior the team, the harder it becomes to apply the same standards the team applies to others.

Why this happens

There are structural reasons. Senior teams are typically constituted from peers with equal power and independent mandates. There is no obvious person whose job it is to call out a colleague. The leader of the team can do it - but doing so repeatedly, and at the same level as they would with a direct report, feels like a category error. The relationship norms at senior level are different, and they are enforced informally and powerfully.

There are psychological reasons too. Senior leaders reached their positions partly through the ability to manage their own reputation effectively. That skill does not disappear when they join a team. It continues to operate, and one of the things it operates on is the question of whether to raise a concern about a colleague's performance or whether the cost of doing so is higher than the benefit.

In most senior teams, the calculation runs against raising it. The relationship matters. The political capital cost is real. The outcome is uncertain. So the concern is managed rather than named, and the pattern continues.

What healthy collective accountability looks like

Patrick Lencioni's work on team dysfunction identifies the absence of accountability as one of the most common and most damaging team failures - specifically, peer-to-peer accountability. The teams that function well have developed the norm that calling out a colleague's underperformance is not an act of aggression. It is an act of commitment to the shared outcome.

That norm is never established through a conversation about values. It is established by the leader modelling it - naming their own missed commitments before anyone else can, and responding with genuine curiosity (rather than defensiveness) when a colleague does the same for them.

It requires the team to have a clear view of what they collectively own, as distinct from what each function owns individually. Without that, accountability has nothing to attach to.

The question for this week

What does your senior team collectively own, as a team - not as individuals with parallel responsibilities? And when that collective deliverable is missed, what actually happens? Who names it, to whom, and what follows?

Issue 16: Roles, clarity, and the hidden cost of ambiguity - why unclear boundaries at the top create friction throughout the whole system below.

If something in this issue resonated and you'd like to think it through in the context of your own organisation or leadership - a Chemistry Session is a free 30-minute conversation. No pitch, no obligation. Book here.

Dr Andrew A Walker | Chartered Psychologist | Leadership Coach | andrewantonywalker.com