Accountability Hinders True Potential
Every SpaceX rocket launch is treated as a science experiment where data is collected, and later analyzed for lessons learned to be used in the future.
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We've been misled. Accountability, while often seen as the key to responsibility and growth, is only half the story. In reality, it’s a limited framework that often does more harm than good.
What if we embraced a different approach instead of constantly measuring ourselves against some external yardstick? One that encourages us to own all aspects of who we are—the wins, the stumbles, the lessons, the messy, glorious human experience? That's what I want to explore in this article: the power of Ownership.
What accountability actually sets up
I felt this before I had language for it. Years ago, in a corporate job, my Senior VP told me — in a moment of candor, not malice — "heads will roll if you screw up." That was the whole management philosophy in five words: perform, or someone pays. He wasn't trying to threaten me. That's just how leadership got talked about in that building.
Strip the word down and you'll find that same machine underneath it everywhere. Accountability says: if you break it, you buy it. Which means someone has to decide what counts as broken, and someone has to be the one who pays. You've just built a courtroom — a prosecution, a defense, and a judge.
The moment people sense they're in that courtroom, they stop creating and start protecting. They play it safe. They stop raising their hand with the half-formed idea. They wait for explicit instructions so that if it goes sideways, the blame has somewhere else to land. Accountability cultures don't produce bold people. They produce careful ones — people optimizing to not be the one holding the bag.
That's not a character flaw in your team. It's the predictable response to being watched by a judge.
Ownership is a different machine entirely
Ownership asks a completely different question. Not whose fault is this? but what's the full picture here, including how did I contribute to getting these results?, and what do I choose to do about it?
Think like an engineer instead of a prosecutor. When a SpaceX tests a new design and it blows up on the pad, nobody convenes a tribunal. They pull the data. The explosion wasn't a failure to be punished — it was the most expensive lesson they bought that week, and they're going to use every bit of it. There's success, and there's learning. Those are the only two outcomes on the table.
Ownership sounds like: I own all of this — the actions and the results. Here's what I see. Here's what I learned. Here's what I'm doing next. No defense attorney required, because nobody's on trial. And here's what's counterintuitive — ownership is more rigorous than accountability, not less. It's harder to look clearly at your own contribution than it is to find someone to blame. Blame is the lazy option dressed up as standards.
The trap nobody names: the Judge
In coaching I talk about the drama triangle — the three roles we slip into when we're below our best. The Victim ("this is happening to me"). The Villain ("it's their fault"). The Hero ("I'll swoop in and fix it"). Most leadership advice stops there. But underneath all three is a fourth role that powers the whole thing: the Judge. The part of us that's constantly ruling on who's right, who's wrong, who deserves what. The Judge is what keeps the courtroom open.
A leader I worked with had a situation where someone left his team on bad terms and started lashing out from the outside. His instinct was immediate: defend his people, set the record straight, make sure the person knew they were in the wrong. Pure courtroom. Prosecute, defend, win.
What actually served him was the opposite move. Step back. See the bigger game. Ask not "who's right here?" but "is engaging in this actually working for me — at what cost?" He put it in his own words: he'd rather protect his peace than win the argument. That's not weakness, and it's not letting it go. It's refusing to spend his best energy in a courtroom that was never going to produce anything but more heat.
The shift is from Judge to something else: Creator (what do I want to build here?), Challenger (what's the truth that needs saying?), or Coach (what does this person actually need?). None of those require a verdict.
This isn't about going soft
Let me be clear, because "ownership over accountability" might get misheard as "there's no consequences because there's no accountability." It's the opposite — ownership doesn't lower the bar, it raises it. And it moves the bar from punishment to agency and growth.
Ownership removes the judge, not the stakes. People conflate "no consequences for you" with "nothing's expected of you" — but the judge was never what made the standard high. The standard was always yours to meet; the judge just decided who to blame when you didn't. The question stops being how do I make them pay? and becomes how do I make this work, and what's mine to own in it?
The most useful question I ask leaders — borrowed from Jerry Colonna's Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up — is also the most uncomfortable: how have you been complicit in creating the very conditions you say you don't want? Not to assign blame, but to find power instead. Because the parts of a situation you own are the only parts you can actually change. Everything you hand to a villain or a judge, you've handed away. You've made yourself a spectator in your own problem.
Accountability keeps you a spectator, waiting for the verdict (usually from somebody "out there", never from you). Ownership puts you back in the driver's seat — which is exactly where your potential has been waiting for you the whole time.
That comment from my VP stuck with me for months — not as a threat anymore, but as a diagnostic. I was optimizing for not screwing up in front of people I didn't even want to impress. Once I asked the ownership question instead — is this actually working for me? — the honest answer was no. So I left. It's one of the best decisions I've ever made, and it only happened once I stopped waiting for a verdict and started owning the choice.
Ownership over control is one of four shifts at the core of how I work. The Shift In Life manifesto lays out all four.
If you're leading a careful team and wondering where the boldness went, that's a conversation worth having. Let's talk →
