The Accountability Deficit
Why Most Leaders Avoid It and What It Costs Them
There is a pattern I have observed in organizations at every level of complexity. When something goes wrong, the search for accountability produces a long list of contributing factors, structural issues, external conditions, and collective decisions.
What it rarely produces is a person who says ‘this was my responsibility, and I did not deliver’.
This is not a coincidence. Institutions are built to diffuse accountability. The more complex the organization, the more diffuse it becomes. By the time a decision has passed through enough committees, approval chains, and cross-functional sign-offs, the sense of personal ownership has evaporated entirely. This is one of the most expensive structural failures in businesses.
Genuine accountability has two components that most organizations usually practice separately, if at all.
Public commitment with real stakes. At the start of the Nissan Revival Plan, I committed publicly to a specific set of targets. If we did not deliver by the set date, I would resign. Not because I was asked to, but because the commitment would have been meaningless without a consequence attached.
Structural visibility. Accountability cannot be personal if it is not specific. Every manager at Nissan was required to submit an annual ranked list of 5 successors for their own role. This created an ongoing obligation, as you had to know your people well enough to name them, assess them, and develop their skills. That is accountability embedded within the architecture of the organization, not left to individual responsibility.
The question I am also asked often is: how do you maintain accountability across a global organization you cannot oversee directly?
The answer lies in design, not excessive scrutiny.
When we launched our EV program, I spent the first 6 months personally present in engineering and technical meetings. Not to manage the detail, but to send a clear signal that this is a priority and leadership is paying attention. Once the right people were accountable for the right outcomes, I stepped back to regular touchpoints only.
This is the distinction between being informed and being involved. CEOs who collapse into operational detail are not more accountable. They are less, because they have made themselves responsible for decisions that should belong to others, and in doing so removed the mechanism that holds those others accountable.
The structures that sustain accountability are rarely glamorous. Clear targets. Named owners. Regular reviews with real consequences for deviation. The succession planning that forces honest assessment of who can replace whom.
And what makes them sustainable is consistency.
Accountability applied selectively, or only in crisis, builds a fear of being caught, not a sustainable culture. Those are not the same thing, and the organizations that confuse them eventually discover the difference at considerable cost.
Let me know what you think in the comments.
Great and simple reflections, as always, Carlos.
I would add a few factors to this equation. In many organizations, I also see excessive centralization, limited autonomy, and an overemphasis on financial outcomes as key barriers to accountability.
When leaders do not give enough autonomy, do not recognize or reward ownership, and do not create the right space for people to make decisions, accountability naturally weakens. People cannot be truly accountable for outcomes if they are not empowered to shape them.
So, in addition to clear targets, named owners, regular reviews, and real consequences, I believe accountability also requires trust, autonomy, recognition, and a leadership model that allows people to own decisions rather than simply execute instructions.
I would like to thank you for sharing your experiences and allowing us to learn from them. I have a genuine question for you: Did you identify five potential successors during your time at Nissan? If so, did one of them eventually replace you?