From Control to Trust: Rethinking Accountability Through Self-Leadership

Many leaders struggle to build an accountability culture that truly lasts. They tighten systems, add structure, or hold people to higher standards, yet true accountability never comes from control. It begins with self-leadership and the trust it creates.

I remember working with a leadership team who were exhausted. They had strong values, talented people, and good systems, but the same issues kept resurfacing. Projects stalled. Tensions simmered.

In our first retreat, one of them said, “It feels like I’m the only one holding people accountable.” Heads nodded all around the table.

That moment is familiar for many leaders I work with. You want your team to take ownership, yet somehow the work and the worry keep rolling back to you. So you add more meetings, more dashboards, clearer expectations. You “hold people accountable” harder, but little changes.

You still feel like the only one carrying the load. That is the moment to pause and look inward.

A culture of accountability does not begin with new performance systems, it begins with how we lead ourselves, especially when things get hard.

How Self-Leadership Shapes Accountability

Every leader encounters moments when there is a gap between where things are and where you want them to be. A missed goal, a shifting priority, a project that has gone off track. How you respond to that gap determines everything about your leadership culture and your team’s accountability.

When facing a gap, we can react from one of two places:

• Above the line: open, curious, adaptive, grounded in learning and creativity.

• Below the line: defensive, reactive, and protective, seeing change as a threat rather than an opportunity.

I see this play out constantly in leadership coaching. A leader describes a team member who is not meeting expectations. They have already tried giving clearer instructions and checking in more often. But their team hears their tone tightens as they talk; they are braced for disappointment. They are operating below the line.

The shift begins when they pause long enough to notice that stance and choose differently. When these leaders reconnect with curiosity and possibility, the energy in their team changes too. That is what above-the-line leadership looks like in practice: holding both clarity and openness at the same time.

Two Common Ways Leaders Sabotage Accountability

When we lead from below the line, two predictable patterns appear, and both unintentionally erode accountability.

1. Persecuting

When something goes wrong, it is easy to focus on who dropped the ball.

“What went wrong?” “Why didn’t they do it?” “Who is responsible?”

One director I worked with caught herself doing this in every team meeting. Her intentions were good: she cared deeply about results. But her questions came from frustration, and her team had learned to go silent until she calmed down.

When she began experimenting with different questions like “What’s getting in the way?” or “What have we learned?”, the tone shifted. People started offering solutions instead of excuses. Accountability became something they shared, not something she enforced.

2. Rescuing

The other trap looks kinder on the surface. You see someone struggling and you step in to help.

“It’s okay, I’ll take care of it.” “I’ll finish this part, it’s faster if I do it.”

I worked with a CEO who works long hours before every major deadline, quietly redoing her team’s work to make sure it meets her standards. She told herself it is easier than coaching them through revisions, especially when time is short and the stakes are high. But over time, this pattern kept her team from developing the capability and confidence she needed from them.

When she started resisting the urge to redo the work and instead used those moments as coaching opportunities, something shifted. She began asking her team to review their own work, identify what they would improve, and bring her a plan. Within a few months, the quality improved on its own, and she reclaimed time to focus on strategy and growth.

The Shift: From Persecutor to Challenger, From Rescuer to Coach

The antidote to both patterns is to shift from control to partnership: to engage people as creative, capable contributors rather than problems to solve.

From Persecutor to Challenger

When you see a gap, your job is not to assign blame but to hold the bar high and stay in partnership as others rise to meet it.

That means being clear about expectations, giving regular feedback, and creating space for people to figure things out, even imperfectly.

In team retreats I facilitate, we often practice this through real scenarios. Leaders articulate a high standard, then invite dialogue about how their team can get there. The learning is immediate: accountability is not about pressure, it is about partnership.

Instead of, “You’re not meeting expectations,” try:

“Here’s the outcome we need. What’s your plan for getting there? What support do you need from me?”

You are still challenging performance, but in a way that signals belief in the person’s capability. You are inviting accountability, not enforcing it.

From Rescuer to Coach

When you feel the pull to jump in and fix, pause. Ask yourself:

“What would it look like to support this person to solve the problem themselves?”

Coaching is not about withholding help, it is about how you help. You can teach, model, and share templates. You can even roll up your sleeves alongside them. However your intention in this matters: you are there to grow their capability, not do the work for them.

This shift is often the focus of my one-on-one coaching. Leaders learn to create accountability conversations that build capacity, not dependency. As one client put it, “I finally realized that my job isn’t to get the work done. My job is to make sure my team can.”

There is a big difference between a leader who gets the job done and a leader who does their job.

A leader who gets the job done often takes accountability away from others.

A leader who does their job builds accountability within others.

What It Takes to Lead This Way

Leading through self-leadership and trust takes discipline:

→ It means slowing down when your instincts want to speed up.

→ It means creating time for coaching when time feels scarce.

→ It means staying open when you want to defend.

It also means taking responsibility for your own patterns: first, by noticing when you are blaming, rescuing, or slipping into defensiveness, and then choosing a different response. That is the essence of self-leadership.

When organizations invest in leadership development, this is the foundation we focus on. Because accountability systems only work when they are paired with human systems: the mindsets, relationships, and behaviours that make accountability safe and possible.

The Compounding Effect of Trust

When you lead from trust instead of control, you make daily micro-deposits into your team’s accountability bank. You teach, by example, that challenges are not threats, but opportunities to grow capability and connection.

Over time, those micro-deposits compound: people start anticipating needs, owning problems, and collaborating creatively, and they bring you solutions instead of issues.

And you, in turn, get to focus on the parts of your role that only you can do: strategy, vision, and innovation. This is often the focus of my work: helping leadership teams create conditions where accountability and innovation can coexist.

That is the moment when accountability truly takes root: when everyone, at every level, sees themselves as capable, responsible, and resourceful in creating the results that matter most.

Real accountability does not come from control. It grows from trust, self-leadership, and the belief that people are capable of more than we imagine when we give them the space to lead themselves.