Are You Solving the Wrong Accountability Problem?

 Accountability Doesn't Just Flow Down. It Flows Up, Too 

I've been coaching a leader, let's call her Simone, who was struggling with one of her direct reports. He didn't listen to her. He did what he wanted. And when she held a line he didn't like, he went around her.

Not just to her boss. To her boss's boss. And it worked. He got what he wanted.

We don't talk about this part of accountability enough: accountability isn't just something managers enforce downward. It's a system, and when the system is broken at any level, the whole thing collapses.

When Bad Behavior Gets Results, It Continues

Reinforcement theory holds that people repeat behaviors that are rewarded and discontinue behaviors that aren't (Skinner, 1938; as applied to organizations in Luthans & Kreitner, 1985). Put simply, if going around Simone got her direct report what he wanted, why would he stop going around her? He had learned the system. And the system was teaching him that going above his boss worked.

But systems don't run themselves. They run on individual decisions. Every time the senior leader picked up that call from Simone's direct report, that was a choice. A well-meaning one, probably. But a choice that was showing him how the system worked.

The problem wasn't just him. The problem was what the system was reinforcing.

Bypassing the Chain of Command Has Organizational Consequences

When employees go around their direct supervisors, and senior leaders allow it, the damage spreads quickly. Research on chain-of-command dynamics makes clear that when established channels are bypassed, it becomes increasingly difficult to determine who is responsible for decisions, leading to confusion, a lack of ownership, and eroding accountability throughout the organization (Ayers, Journal of Urgent Care Medicine, 2018).

That's not an HR problem. That's a leadership problem at all levels.

The leaders at the top who take those calls are dismantling the authority of the managers below them, often without realizing it. Leaders at every level are responsible for spotting when the system is working against them (Reed, The Systems Thinker, 2006). Accessibility is a good value. But accessibility that bypasses accountability is a liability.

The System Has to Change, Not Just the Conversation

Simone could have kept having the same hard conversation with her direct report week after week. She could have documented it, coached it, and addressed it in performance reviews. And none of it would have mattered as long as escalating got him results.

You can coach a person all day long. But if the bad behavior is working for them, they'll keep doing it. The problem isn't the individual. It's what the system is rewarding.

This is core to systems thinking: when behavior persists in one area, look for what's enabling it somewhere else in the system (Senge, The Fifth Discipline, 1990). An open-door policy at the top can quietly destroy mid-level leadership authority. No one intends it. But systems aren't held together by intentions. They're held together by the cumulative impact of individual decisions, made daily, often without awareness of their downstream effect. The good news is that what individual decisions can build, individual decisions can also dismantle.

What Happened Next

Last week, I got a text from Simone's boss that made me actually do a little dance while I was at the playground with my kids.

The day before, I had met with Simone's boss and encouraged her to go directly to that senior leader. She did. She had a courageous conversation framed around how the lack of accountability was preventing her from achieving the mission of her team.

The ask was simple: stop taking his calls and direct him back to Simone.

And that leader agreed. One conversation. One decision. And the potential for a system to change.

In this case, accountability wasn't another hard conversation between Simone and her direct report. It was a realignment of the structural incentives. The senior leader removed herself from the bypass loop. The shortcut no longer worked. Suddenly, accountability had a chance.

I celebrated that text not because the situation was resolved, but because the conditions for resolution had been created. The principle of extinction in behavioral science tells us that undesired behavior will decline as a result of a lack of positive reinforcement (Luthans & Kreitner, 1985). When a behavior stops producing results, it loses its power.

When Simone's situation changed, it wasn't because her direct report had a breakthrough. It was because the people above her finally closed the loophole. They made individual decisions that redesigned the system around them.

That's what accountability looks like when it works at every level. And that's worth celebrating.

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