6 Great Reasons Why CEOs Need To Hold Their Employees Accountable

We are working on several coaching projects where CEOs struggle to hold their team members accountable. When we ask these leaders why they don’t hold employees accountable to do the things they are responsible for doing and in the timeframe they have set for accomplishment, some of the common excuses include:

1. They expect their direct reports to communicate, collaborate, and work well with their cross-departmental colleagues and do not feel they should have to resolve conflict between team members.
2. They are too busy getting the operational parts of their job done and have not had the time to sit down and coach and counsel the employees.
3. Their schedule has not aligned with the employees. 
4. So much time has passed since the accountability issue occurred that the leader feels it would be inappropriate to bring up the problem now.
5. The CEO hopes the employee who is not accountable will resign or retire soon.
6. The CEO does not see the problem as that big of an issue. 
7. The CEO has not been honest and shared their concerns with the executive in the past in one-on-one meetings or their performance review. 
8. The employee is well-liked by the CEO’s board, and every time the CEO has tried to coach the employee in the past, they run to a board member and complain about the poor treatment from the CEO.
9. The CEO and the executive direct report are friends, and they don’t want to hurt the executive’s feelings.

Although each of these reasons sounds legitimate to the CEOs we are coaching, all of them are excuses that undermine both the CEO’s and the organization’s success. 

We have written previous blogs on how to coach an employee and hold them accountable. This blog is focused on the most important reasons why CEOs need to power through their excuses, lean into conflict, and be accountable to hold their direct reports accountable for being a great team player who has a reputation for high-quality, on-time performance in their job. 

Here are six reasons we hope will motivate a CEO or C-level leader to raise the bar on accountability with members of their executive team.

Bad Reputation: There are only two types of reputations. Good ones and bad ones. When CEOs do not hold all their executives accountable, they develop a bad reputation as leaders.

Lack of Respect: One of your job responsibilities is holding all your executives accountable. When you do not do your job, you lose respect. Your initial thoughts may be that the accountable team members are the ones who lose respect for you. You are correct, but that is not all. The executive who is not doing their job does not respect you either. If they did respect you, they would be doing their job and making you look like a great leader.

Lower Results: When the executives on your team are not accountable, the negative results spiral downward throughout the organization. Remember, if you are not holding leaders accountable for executing the company’s goals, the company will not see the results it needs to succeed. 

Conflict Increases: When executives don’t do what they are supposed to, it negatively impacts others in the organization, including the CEO. When people are negatively impacted by an executive who is either not producing quality work, on-time work or being a good team player, you almost always will have others tell you directly or indirectly that you are not doing your job (holding your team accountable).

Unhappy Team Members: No one is happy when a CEO does not hold people accountable. The team member who goes to bed each night knows they are not doing their job and are letting fellow team members down, as well as you and everyone else on the team who must deal with the fallout. 

You Hate Your Job: When executive team members do not do what we pay them to do, and you, as CEO, do not hold them accountable, you are guaranteed to have more long-term stress. When stress continues over long periods, most CEOs start to dislike their job… especially coming to work and looking at someone they are not holding accountable. 

That is it in a nutshell. If you want to have a lousy reputation as a CEO who is not respected, produces poor results with unhappy team members who thrive in conflict and stress and, ultimately, hate your job, then you now know the formula… don’t hold your executive team members accountable.