Holding People Accountable
Why the conversations you have later depend on the expectations you establish today.
August is one of the busiest months of my year. I spend much of it travelling around Asia, giving beginning-of-year keynotes to whole-school faculties and facilitating Leadership Bootcamps with Senior and Middle Leaders as they prepare for the year ahead.
I love this work because, in a relatively short period of time, I get to work with leaders and teachers across very different schools, listen to what they are wrestling with, and see the patterns that emerge between them.
The contexts vary enormously. The patterns rarely do.
One theme I have been exploring repeatedly this August is Building a Culture of Accountability and Support. It has led to some particularly interesting conversations about what accountability actually means, how leaders can hold people to expectations without creating a culture of fear, and what needs to be established now if we want to have more difficult conversations later in the year.
In these sessions, I have been asking participants a simple Mentimeter question:
When you hear the word accountability, what comes to mind?
The biggest responses were responsibility, ownership and reliability. There was plenty of trust, support, consistency and care too.
But other words appeared: judgement. Scared. Punishment.
What interested me wasn't just which words were biggest. It was how quickly the tension appeared.
Most people are not opposed to accountability. What they are often wary of is accountability without clarity, care or support.
So I followed with another question:
When has being held accountable actually felt supportive?
Again, the answers were remarkably consistent. People talked about clear expectations. Trust. Useful feedback. Regular follow-up. Resources. Being listened to. Consistency. Growth rather than blame.
For Middle Leaders, there is an important message here:
Accountability and support are not opposites. They are a polarity we have to manage.
Start by getting clear about what matters
This is one reason I keep encouraging Middle Leaders I work with to use a 30–60–90 day plan.
Not because you need another list.
You've probably already got one.
The problem is that August has a habit of making everything feel equally important.
The problem isn't that leaders don't know what's important.
It's that schools are brilliantly designed to distract you from it.
The urgent has a habit of masquerading as the important. If we're not careful, we spend our days solving today's immediate problems whilst neglecting the work that would prevent tomorrow's.
This is why I encourage leaders to identify their three most important priorities in each 30-day period.
Three. Not thirteen.
And within those priorities, be particularly clear about two things:
What is non-negotiable for me in my role?
What is non-negotiable for the people I lead?
Some of those non-negotiables will come directly from your school. They may relate to curriculum expectations, assessment processes, safeguarding, communication, planning requirements or agreed approaches to teaching and learning.
Others will relate to how your own team works together.
Either way, people need to know what they are.
You cannot effectively hold someone accountable to an expectation you have never clearly articulated.
That is where clarity and compassion meet.
Clarity says: This matters. This is what we have agreed. This is what good looks like.
Compassion says: I want to understand what is getting in the way. What support do you need? How can we make this achievable?
Too much accountability without support can quickly become surveillance.
Too much support without accountability can become rescuing, avoidance and endlessly renegotiated expectations.
High-performing teams need both.
Establish the norms before you need them
This is particularly important at the beginning of the year.
Middle Leaders are often eager to get into the “real work”: curriculum development, professional inquiry, assessment, pedagogical improvement and all the transformational work we hope our teams will undertake.
I understand the temptation.
But your ability to do that work later depends heavily on the behaviours you reinforce now.
During my recent sessions, I asked teams to identify norms that would help them balance accountability and support.
Their suggestions included timely and honest evidence-based feedback, clear expectations, shared responsibility, respect, trust, positive intentions and asking questions rather than making assumptions.
These are not fluffy team-building exercises.
They are infrastructure.
If your team agrees that concerns should be raised early and privately, reinforce that now.
If you agree that people should ask for help before a commitment is missed, reinforce that now.
If deadlines, owners and follow-up matter, put them into your meeting routines now.
If evidence should come before assumptions, model that now.
And don't just write your norms during the first meeting and then forget about them.
Return to them. Refer to them. Ask how well you are living them. Make them visible in agendas and discussions.
Most importantly, hold people accountable to them early.
Because every time a norm is ignored without being addressed, you teach the team that the norm is optional.
Don't let the elephant into the room
This is where Middle Leaders sometimes get themselves into trouble.
Someone misses an agreed deadline and you let it go.
Someone repeatedly arrives unprepared and you work around them.
Someone openly ignores an agreed team practice and you decide it is too early in the year to make an issue of it.
Maybe you tell yourself you are being supportive. Maybe you want to preserve the relationship. Maybe you don't want to come across as overly authoritative at the beginning of the year.
But the rest of the team is watching too.
Soon they have learned something very different from the norms written on your slide or displayed in your meeting agenda.
They have learned what you will actually tolerate.
And eventually the elephant enters the room.
Or, as I sometimes joke with teams, Bruno does.
If you know Encanto, you know the problem: everyone knows about Bruno. Everyone has an opinion about Bruno. Everyone talks around Bruno.
They just don't talk to Bruno.
Schools can be very good at this.
We discuss the colleague after the meeting. We mention the frustration to another team leader. We adjust systems to compensate for someone. We pick up work they haven't completed. We hope they will eventually notice.
And gradually, Bruno becomes the staff member everyone talks about, but nobody talks to.
Then, three months later, when the Middle Leader finally addresses the problem, the colleague understandably wonders:
Why are you only telling me this now? This has come totally out of the blue.
What feels to you like months of accumulated frustration feels to them like a sudden personal attack.
Worse, you may now be asking them to comply with an expectation that, through your own silence, you have spent three months signalling wasn't actually that important.
That is why early accountability matters.
A respectful conversation in September about a missed agreement is often far kinder than a much more difficult conversation in January about an established pattern.
Talk to Bruno before everyone else starts talking about Bruno.
Accountability now makes transformation possible later
There is another reason this matters.
Most Middle Leaders I work with want their teams to do more than simply complete tasks.
They want teachers collaborating deeply. Examining student work. Asking difficult questions about practice. Trying something new. Giving each other feedback. Engaging in professional inquiry. Changing established approaches when the evidence tells them they should.
That requires trust.
But trust doesn't mean the absence of accountability.
In fact, I would argue that the transformative work becomes much easier when the team already knows that agreements matter.
When people have experienced you consistently addressing the small things with clarity and compassion, difficult conversations later are less likely to feel arbitrary or personal.
The expectation is already established:
This is how we work together.
This is what we agreed.
When something gets in the way, we talk about it.
When someone needs support, we provide it.
And when we make commitments to one another, we follow through.
That is a very different culture from one where everything is fine until suddenly it isn't.
Make accountability predictable, not surprising
Accountability feels supportive when people know what will happen.
That does not require constant checking.
In fact, strong leadership systems should reduce the need for reminders, rescuing and emotional chasing.
Meeting routines, recurring check-ins, visible deadlines, clear ownership and agreed follow-up all make accountability less personal because they make it more predictable.
A few simple questions can help:
What are our three priorities right now?
What is genuinely non-negotiable?
What does this expectation look like in practice?
Who owns the next step?
What support might be needed?
When will we review it?
What will we do if the commitment isn't met?
Then follow through.
Not aggressively. Not bureaucratically. Not with a “gotcha”.
With clarity and compassion.
The goal isn't to catch people doing something wrong.
It is to create a professional culture where people know what matters, know what they own, know where support is available and trust that commitments mean something.
The groundwork you put in place now matters enormously. The stronger your team's clarity, norms and routines become in these first weeks, the more ambitious the professional work you can undertake together later.
Will You Be a Supervisor or Leader This Year?
On September 14, I’ll be exploring these ideas further in the MiLL webinar Will You Be a Supervisor or Leader This Year?
We'll look at what Middle Leaders can do early in the year to move beyond simply supervising tasks and begin building the clarity, routines and relationships that enable a team to perform.
MiLL members can also access our 30-60-90 day planning resource to help identify priorities, clarify what is non-negotiable and make these first months more intentional.
And if your school year has already started, that doesn't mean you've missed the opportunity.
Our First Week Planning Checklist is free, and it remains a useful audit even if your first week is already behind you.
Use it to ask yourself:
What have I already made clear?
What norms have we established but not yet reinforced?
What expectations still exist only in my head?
And is there a Bruno I need to talk to before an elephant enters the room?
It is much easier to establish clarity now than to repair ambiguity later.
