I Swear by Apollo: Being Accountable to Yourself in Leadership

“I swear by Apollo”… so starts the Oath of Hippocrates, an oath of ethical, professional behavior sworn by all new physicians – a promise to practice good medicine to the best of their ability, for the good of their patients. It essentially boils down to a commitment to “do no harm”. Wouldn’t it be great to have such an oath for leaders – an oath of personal accountability, not just for business outcomes and for leading others, but for leading oneself. I am reminded of the proverb “Physician, heal thyself”, suggesting that one should take care of one’s own faults first before correcting the faults of others – so I add to the above: Leader, lead thyself.

Any nuts-and-bolts leadership primer will explain that one of the key leadership competencies is holding others accountable. This entails, among other things, setting clear expectations and guidelines, clearly communicating goals and objectives, following up to ensure fulfillment of responsibilities, providing feedback on performance, coaching those whose performance is not up to par and, finally, taking any necessary corrective action. But a leader cannot expect to hold others accountable successfully if they are not holding themselves accountable first.

While this is an important dimension of leadership, it is easy to slip, when it comes to accountability for our own behavior. This can happen even to leaders who do a great job at holding themselves accountable for the big ticket items such as driving for results, whether in sales, operations, marketing or financing, identifying root causes for business problems, developing a vision and strategy and managing resources effectively.

Let’s clarify something before we proceed: no leader worth his salt wakes up in the morning deciding that he or she is not going to be accountable today. No one wants to do a bad job. But things happen during the course of the day that can divert the best of us from our good intentions and more often than not, it is unintentional, personal “slips”. It is about these seemingly innocuous personal slips that I want to talk. They take many, subtle forms. Let’s explore a few of the garden-variety ones:

• You have a chronic problem employee but you don’t make the tough decision to let the individual go, because you want to be a nice person. Instead, after much deliberation and agony, you decide to transfer the person to another department – essentially moving the problem to another part of the company and hoping it goes away. Deep down, your intuition is whispering to you that the problem has not been solved but, in your elation at having found the solution to a nagging problem, you hush your intuition. You come to the office the next day, with a spring in your step and a song in your heart – relieved at having shed a burden.

• A senior member of your team has a habit of treating less influential ones very poorly in meetings, interrupting them, discounting their contributions and generally exhibiting poster-like bad behavior. It mortifies the recipients, embarrasses other team members and even bothers you. Again, though, because you value harmony and hate confrontation of any kind, you choose to ignore the offending behavior and hope that it will stop on its own. The fact that the perpetuator is an aggressive, high achiever, successfully delivering results, makes it even harder for you to step up and do something.

•You have just announced the company’s drastic cost cutting measures and asked for everyone in your department to cooperate by eliminating all discretionary spending. You delivered a genuinely inspiring speech to your team and everyone is on board to make this work. Two days later, employees see a $1,000 chair delivered to your office – an earlier purchase you had genuinely forgotten to cancel. Others, of course, don’t judge us by our intentions – they only have the appearance of events to judge you by.

• A mistake was made, the ownership of which falls on several shoulders including yours. Driven by the anxiety and chaos that ensues, you minimize your role in the fracas, and even unwittingly suffer from temporary corporate amnesia, forgetting that you were fully briefed in advance. You set out to find a scapegoat, genuinely convincing yourself that it is surely their fault. This can easily happen in times of stress because, as a leader, you handle dozens of issues on a daily basis. However, others involved only handle a few issues and remember the course of events with laser-like precision.

Well, the list can go on. Some slips are due to personality preferences, others just from the sheer amount of work and stress that leaders often experience. The reasons are multiple and really not important. It’s the behaviors that are important.

They are all examples of behaviors you would not condone in others when you set out to hold them accountable. And as we all know, when there is a disparity between what you tell others to do and what you do yourself, people will believe your actions and not your words. The fallout of this scenario is an erosion of trust, one of the high prices we pay for lack of self-accountability.

Let’s also not neglect to mention that, as a leader, you sometimes have to take unpopular decisions and this can, by itself, elicit criticism. You are always in a fishbowl.