T10. Embracing accountability
Create shared responsibility for outcomes. Accountability strengthens performance and trust.
Resources to support growth in this behaviour
Whether this behaviour has been chosen through Step 1. Diagnose, highlighted through reflection or coaching, or identified as a school or trust priority, you can now follow the steps below to develop and embed it in your daily leadership practice.
Step 2. Learn: Read Everyone Succeeds: 54 Leadership Behaviours to Transform Your School to understand what great leadership looks like in practice. Each behaviour is grounded in research and real examples from schools and businesses.
Step 3. Reflect: Use the Everyone Succeeds Workbook to apply ideas to your own context.
Guided reflection, practical actions, and space for planning turn understanding into improvement.
Step 4. Apply: Work through the Leadership Toolkit for this behaviour. Use the Embrace Accountability toolkit to build honest, supportive routines where performance is discussed openly and improvement is expected.
Step 5. Coach and practice: Use the Embracing accountability Coach and Practise Frameworks to strengthen the behaviour through coaching questions about ownership, rehearsing holding self and others to account so standards are upheld.
These can be used individually or with colleagues to embed key behaviours.
Step 6. Plan: Set measurable goals using the 90 Day Leadership Planner.
Turn improvement into action by tracking your focus and progress over time, with completed examples for different career stages.
Step 7. Lead: Apply your learning to real situations through the Scenario Finder.
Over fifty scenarios link directly to the behaviours that help you solve the challenges that matter most in your school.
One book suggestion
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team – Patrick Lencioni (2002).
This text supports the behaviour by illustrating how shared accountability strengthens commitment, quality and team cohesion. Buy the book.
References from the Everyone Succeeds book
Eisenberger, R., Stinglhamber, M., & Mellers, J. (1997) Perceived leader legitimacy and procedural justice: A relational model of acceptance and trust in leaders. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72(2), 321-338.
Kluger, A. N., & DeNisi, A. S. (1996). Effects of feedback intervention on performance: A field experiment. Journal of Applied Psychology, 81(4), 350-359.
Lencioni, P.M., (2012) The advantage: Why organisational health trumps everything else in business. John Wiley & Sons.