The Case for Accountability

A poster held up at a No Kings Protest, Summer 2025

President Truman famously had a sign on his desk which said, “The Buck Stops Here.”

Signs are signals, outward, and reminders, inward. As a quick example - I’m famous for tattooing phrases on myself that I want to keep top of my mind and importance, but also it gives me an opportunity to talk about beliefs that I hold closely when asked about them.

We do this with values, mission and vision, and when done right these words become real foundations that we build on and lighthouses that guide people to us.

The concept of accountability in leadership, and specifically the stated Mission of “The Buck Stops Here,” is especially on my mind these days. The Buck Stops Here means that the person at this desk holds the highest accountability - that, in this case the President, had the highest authority to make decisions, but also accept the ultimate responsibility for those decisions. When practiced, it sets a tone and a culture of intense accountability.

I’m a big fan of work cultures that reflect accountability in leadership - never expect of an employee a behavior or a task that you are not willing to embody or complete yourself. The tone that leadership sets and their behaviors are the ultimate framework by which the organization itself runs. If the leadership is dedicated to moving before research, so will your team. If leadership consistently avoids taking responsibility, so will the team. If the leader lies, so will the team.

So what happens then the buck officially no longer stops at the President’s desk? When accountability is bypassed, political opponents are openly prosecuted without cause, when secret police are formed, and desire for violence and retribution is spoken freely from the most powerful people in our country? And beyond tariffs and reduced consumer spending and over-reliance on AI to “fix it cheaper and faster,” - why does this behavior have anything to do with business?

We do not live in closed environments (just, seemingly, closed algorithms) and so we need to expect things to bleed into each other. How the tone is set, people will respond. When it’s clear that compassion, empathy, understanding, and integrity are simply not valued enough, we will see their opposites lauded in the public sphere. And then in the private spheres. Leaders will be expected to act with impunity, and rash decisions where leaders escape unscathed but their teams do not will be expected and rewarded by those with power. Divides increase, wealth gaps too, and trust absolutely dissolves. People compete to get to the top of a pile of ever decreasing resources, stepping on whoever necessary to make sure that they personally are safe.

We saw this a lot when women started to gain power and presence in the workforce and academia - I like to call it the “there can only be one” mentality. One woman was considered to be a lot in a board room, more than that, a risk to productivity and performance (and therefore, not worth it). Women often competed over one chair, even though there were multiple that should have been available. However, there was no expectation among leadership that they should provide more than just one seat for a woman, and women needed the support of political movements and action to ensure that more chairs were produced - that accountability was created for leaders who were too bigoted or disinterested in understanding that gender is not a marker of an ability to perform in any given role. But until the movement to allow women more access into these spaces existed (and then expanded beyond just meaning White women), women could not always be counted on to be allies of other women’s advancement.

Without accountability at the highest levels of our government, those at higher levels of leadership are shown by example that they too are not expected to be accountable to their actions. And that’s a huge problem - for profits, prosperity, performance, and people.

It is punk as fuck to embrace accountability as a core value and core behavior when those around you abdicate it as an obligation of leadership. To opt into a system that is harder, but ultimately produces better results, culture, and society, is to be doing the hard work of producing a future worth living in. To stand in defiance of a system that says that the behavior of leaders doesn’t matter, and that they should be able to do whatever they want without consequence, is resistance worth participating in.

Lack of accountability is all about what we can get away with - acceptance of accountability is all about what we can build and produce together.

A culture of accountability is what a team, a country, and a society needs to strive for if they’re in it for the long haul.

Here are three key ways that you can begin cultivating that culture of accountability in your business from the top down:

1. Know how to apologize and mean it - don’t avoid acknowledging when you’ve really messed up to your team. Figure out how to own it, fix it, and tell them how you’re going to do better…and then demonstrate that as soon as possible. Build it into your company framework.

2. Start having hard conversations - Often under performing or toxic employees get promoted because we’re too scared to actually discipline them, empower them to course correct, or let them go. Develop policies and procedures that help you have hard conversations with employees and stop rewarding behavior you don’t want at your organization and crossing your fingers that it disappears on its own.

3. Do the right thing, even when no one is looking - All actions that undermine the buck stopping with you are actions that break trust with the team. If you are ultimately the most responsible for the consequences of your actions - act like it. Don’t let your team take the fall for you.