Accountability at work is more than just taking responsibility for your own tasks – it’s a mindset that drives performance, trust and growth across teams and businesses.
But what does accountability really look like in a team setting? And more importantly, how can businesses actively improve it?
With the rise of hybrid working, cross-functional teams and rapidly shifting priorities, cultivating accountability isn’t always straightforward – and tracking accountability can be even harder. That’s where a more strategic approach to building soft skills like accountability can make a real difference.
So what does that look like?
Accountability at work means taking ownership of your actions, decisions and outcomes – both individually and collectively. It’s about delivering on promises, owning your mistakes and proactively solving problems, without blaming others or passing the buck.
But accountability isn’t just a personal trait. In high-performing teams, accountability is a cultural norm. It’s embedded into workflows, reinforced by managers and enabled by clarity of expectations and feedback loops.
Accountability is also something that requires the right cultural conditions. A healthy learning culture acknowledges that mistakes will happen and uses them as learning opportunities. Instead of finger pointing and blaming others, a good learning culture sees people working together to put things right, even if it’s not technically ‘their responsibility’.
Accountability shows up every single day in a multitude of ways across different roles and levels. For example:
When accountability is present, you see more trust, better collaboration and fewer dropped balls. When it’s missing, confusion and blame creep in, leading to disengagement, lost momentum and underperformance.
Accountability can show up in all sorts of ways, but some key phrases that suggest someone is accountable include:
When someone is accountable, they’re not afraid to own up to and apologise for their mistakes, and you will notice a lot of active, first-person language (“I’ll finish the reports” vs “The reports will be finished”).
In contrast, someone who needs to work on their accountability will say things like:
Of course, there will be times when something isn’t your fault, but an accountable person won’t just use that as an excuse. They’ll find ways to take ownership and get the job done even if it’s not their responsibility, keeping projects moving and ensuring you get the results you need.
Accountability sits at the intersection of self-awareness, communication, reliability and emotional intelligence – all classic soft skills. It can’t be taught through traditional instruction alone. It needs to be modelled, coached and reinforced – an hour-long elearning module about accountability won’t instill the right behaviours or mindsets to make people accountable for their actions.
This makes it notoriously hard to assess and develop without the right tools. You can’t fix what you can’t see, and this lack of visibility is where many L&D teams struggle.
As with all soft skills, accountability isn’t something you can change overnight. Someone who shirks their responsibilities or blames others won’t complete an elearning course or have a single coaching session and be instantly ‘cured’ – it takes time to build the right habits, behaviours and attitudes that contribute to being more accountable at work.
Both the L&D team and the employees themselves can take action to help build accountability, making it a joint effort.
5app’s new AI skills intelligence platform, Helix, helps organisations identify the soft skills that matter most, as well as allowing employees to discover their own strengths and growth areas. It connects the dots between real performance and behaviours like accountability, one of the Core 9 soft skills released at launch, helping people take charge of their own growth and revealing potential blind spots in someone’s soft skills.
With Helix, teams can:
It also allows L&D and talent teams to understand how accountability is showing up across the organisation – for instance, if one team consistently displays high accountability, but another team rarely does, it shows where they need to focus their efforts to boost performance across the whole business.
By putting soft skills like accountability on the map and making them measurable, Helix helps you build a more responsible, high-trust, high-performance culture.
Join 5app’s Helix early access programme and see how you can turn soft skills like accountability into a competitive advantage.