A while back, I sat with a CEO who had built a genuinely good leadership team. Smart people. Well-intentioned. Real commitment to the company. And yet nobody was holding anybody to anything. Deadlines slipped. Decisions got relitigated. And the CEO was quietly filling the holes herself, wondering why everything kept routing back to her. Why This Looks Like a People Problem (And Isn’t) If you lead a team, you’ve probably lived some version of this. And the instinct is to read

Ask a leader who their best performer is, and they’ll answer without hesitating. Ask them how they know, and watch what happens. Usually, it comes back to something that they can see. Who’s always here. Who’s always slammed. Who bills the most hours. And if you ask how they hold that person accountable, you’ll almost always hear the same word: responsibilities. “I hold my people accountable to their responsibilities.” Here’s the problem. Doing your responsibilities and creati