Adam Markel (Resilient Leadership) discusses why people resist holding others accountable and reframes accountability as supportive, team-centered action rather than judgment or punishment. Using sports (baseball mound, Yankees/Red Sox), lifeguard duty, and UPS examples, he shows accountability driven by a shared goal — winning or keeping people safe — and emphasizes leading from any position and the need for feedback (strengths, weaknesses, blind spots). He introduces a feedback method adapted from the military to help with difficult performance conversations.
Chapters
There's a reason why we want to get people to buy into something like that, because ultimately, and this is the hardest part, I think, in an organization, the area where I often will mentor people who are in leadership roles on this topic of accountability, how many of you love to hold other people accountable? Like, no hands and. Oh, it's a couple hands. That's good. And how many. How many of you actually hate it? Yeah. Raise your hand if you really don't like it. Yeah. I don't know if all of you being truthful right now, how many of you really. Well, first of all, where does that feeling come from that we don't want to hold other people accountable? Where does it come from? Fear. Thank you. It comes from everywhere. The same place that everything comes from, and that is from our childhood. This is the perfect opportunity. You throw your parents under the bus yet again. But it started even before that. It started in many places. It started in school because we understand accountability to mean something. What's a word that comes up for you when you think accountability starts with a J? What's the word? Jail. Yes, jail. Before jail comes. What? Thank you. Judgment. It goes. Judgment, then jail. Man, oh, man. Right. How to stay out of jail. That's a whole separate course. But it's. But it's about values, for sure. And here's the thing. I love analogies and sports, whether you're into sports or not. I happen to be, but it's just because they provide great analogies. What's this scene? What's the scene here? Familiar? What is it? Yankees losing. Thank you, sir. It's all right. I had to spend the night with a Boston Red Sox fan. This guy Scott, who? I'm not going to give Scott Frazier now. I said his name. Scott's not here. Man. We had quite a conversation last night. Yes. That's the Yankees on the mound, and they're all gathered around the pitcher. Why? Because he sucks. So how's that conversation go? Guys on the mound not doing so well? Third baseman comes in, catcher comes out. Pitching coach comes out. What's the conversation like? It goes something like this, right? They all approach the mound and they go, buddy, you suck. I can't believe you call yourself a professional hit. The showers going to send you back to the minor leagues? Is that the conversation? What does the conversation look like? Can you get this guy? How's your arm? What happened that last batter? Cross signs. It's a conversation. It's about accountability. Yes, but what's different about that conversation than many of the Accountability conversations that we're familiar with. Thank you. There's no judgment there. What does that team want to do? That's it. They've got one goal as a team, and that goal is to what? What's the goal of these companies? All the companies that are here, what's your one goal? To win. To win. And so that conversation is actually about accountability. That's rooted in something other than judgment. Anybody want to guess what that is? It's going to sound funny in a business context. That conversation is rooted in love. That's what's happening out there. Everybody's on that mound because they have one goal in mind. They want to see that guy succeed. Because when that person succeeds, the team succeeds. And that's what it's all about. There's no politics on that mound. There's no judgment. There's simply love and support. Yes. It's a different way to look at accountability. This is the way we often see it. Isn't that true? Who's responsible? Who's responsible? And in baseball, I'll give you a different team. I moved to the west coast, so this is one of the three games the Padres won that season. And look at where that ball is. You see where the ball is? I love this picture. They're all going to. It's someone else's job to catch that ball. Not my job. Someone else's job to pick up that paper in the hallway. It's a janitor's job. I used to walk past paper in the hall. I'd go into my leadership team meetings, and I'd say, who's responsible for picking this up? And somebody smart would say, the janitor. That's why we have a janitor. Comes in at night, takes care of it. I'd say, so is anybody in this room beneath picking up this paper in our beautiful hallway? The context is about impeccability. You see the event that was put on for you here this week, it was all about impeccability. All the little details, from the LED screens to the way they took care of you last night, every detail was meticulously planned for and executed. Yes. You didn't walk around and see paper on the ground, did you? Because nobody was concerned about whether it's the janitor's job to pick that paper up or not. They want to win a game. This is the game they're winning. Does that make sense? Nobody's pointing who's responsible? Look, UPS is a great example. I love it as a company because even though they have rules for Everything. How you put your key in the ignition, the clothing you wear, how you close and open the door. But they also give their drivers this authority, this autonomy to just make sure they deliver a package. So when Hurricane Andrew hit, they were delivering packages to people in their cars because they couldn't be in their homes. That's a picture of us on the. On the beach. I wanted to just show you one picture, at least with my hair. Okay. I had hair once upon a time. We were posing for this picture. And what you know, when you look at it is that the guy on this that's standing up, he was looking in our water because nobody remember our mantra. Nobody goes down in our water. So he was watching. We were posing. I'll tell you something. When we sat on that stand, we couldn't have an ego because sometimes some other lifeguard would run a rescue right in front of you. It could have been. You were just dazed up there, you know, like you got baked by the sun. The glare could have been in your eyes, whatever. You were having a conversation. You got lost. Somebody's drowning right in front of you, and another lifeguard come run that rescue now. Yeah. Is that embarrassing? It is. Maybe. Maybe that guy was a little more paranoid than you were. But it didn't matter, because the mantra was nobody goes down on our watch. We had each other's backs. It's a certain kind of a leadership context. Does that make sense? It's about leading from any seat or leading from any position on the field. And I think that's really important to bring back to your teams, to look at how it is that you can model that for your teams. The other thing I think is really important when it comes to accountability and creating high performance results is we have to get feedback. We have to know our strengths. We have to know our weaknesses. We have to know our blind spots. I've been using this with leadership teams for a long time. It came from the military. I didn't invent it. I just changed it a bit so I could use it with the teams that I worked with. And I want to give it to you. I want to give it to you to try out for yourself. You can use it in any situation where you don't know how to hold someone accountable. You have to have a difficult conversation about performance.
