By: Kate Sarmiento
Linda Galindo has watched the same pattern play out for years with the leaders and teams she works with. A company rolls out a new accountability effort, a training program, new software, a memo laying out who owns what, and for a few weeks there’s visible energy around it. Then things settle back into what they were before. The same deadlines get missed. The same excuses show up, usually blamed on “the culture,” as if culture were some separate force nobody in the room had a hand in creating. It’s the exact pattern she unpacks in her latest book, Accountability Thieves, and one she’s built her career around since The 85% Solution. Her explanation for why it keeps happening is blunt: you cannot mandate accountability. You can only demonstrate it.
That distinction changes everything about how leaders should approach the problem. Most treat accountability like a policy question, something you fix by writing clearer rules, assigning owners, and tracking the right numbers. It sounds reasonable. It also rarely works, because a mandate only produces compliance, and compliance is not the same thing as someone actually taking ownership of a result.
Compliance Is Not the Same as Caring
Someone who follows a rule just to stay out of trouble isn’t really thinking about the work. They’re thinking about themselves, about what happens if they get caught skipping a step. Ownership is a different animal entirely. It shows up in the person who’s still turning a problem over in their head after they’ve clocked out, who catches something before anyone else notices it’s wrong, who fixes what’s broken without waiting for someone to tell them to. Nobody has to ask twice.
And the numbers back this up in a way that’s hard to argue with. Gallup found that only 33% of the U.S. workforce was engaged at work in 2023 (Source: Gallup, 2023). Do the math on that for a second. Two out of every three people showing up to work were basically just running out the clock, doing enough to get by and nothing more. That’s not a training problem. That’s a trust problem, and no scorecard fixes trust.
Galindo’s take is that leaders confuse activity with change. Writing the policy, holding the meeting, sending the memo, all of that feels like progress. But a mandate handed down from the top rarely survives contact with the actual behavior underneath it, especially when the people at the top don’t demonstrate what’s expected.
What Modeling Actually Looks Like
A lot of leaders are not going to like this part, and Galindo isn’t going to pretend otherwise. Wanting a team to own their results means owning your own first. Out loud. Including the stuff that makes you look bad.
Take a decision that turned out to be wrong. The easy move is to quietly walk it back and hope nobody connects the dots. The harder move, the one Galindo actually requires, is saying so plainly. Same with blame. A project falls short, and it’s tempting to point at “the team” rather than the calls made above them that put the team in that position to begin with. Or take the pressures behind a decision. Leaders love hiding behind “leadership decided,” conveniently forgetting that they are leadership.
Most leaders never get tested on this, because they never let a moment reveal whether they’d own a mistake or explain it away instead. Employees notice which one happens. It tells them whether the rules actually apply to everyone, or just to the people further down the chain.
This is the part most accountability efforts skip. They focus on catching people doing something wrong instead of showing people what doing something right actually looks like, starting at the top. A scorecard can tell you whether someone hit a number. It can’t teach someone how to sit with the discomfort of admitting they missed one, and what they learned from it.
Every Performance Problem Is Really a Trust Problem
Galindo believes that underneath almost every performance issue sits some version of the same unspoken thought: “I don’t trust them to get it done.” A manager doesn’t trust an employee to hit a deadline without checking in constantly, so they add more oversight. An employee doesn’t trust that their honest feedback will land well, so they stay silent and let a small problem grow. Neither side names this directly. It just shows up as silos, turf wars, and the kind of low-grade office politics that eat up hours nobody can account for later.
The discomfort runs in both directions, and recent numbers back that up. A 2026 survey of 600 U.S. employees, spanning entry-level staff up through executives, found that nearly half of executives, 45.8%, say a lack of honest feedback is their biggest concern (Source: Radical Candor/CNBC, 2026). The same survey also found that 61.3% of individual contributors regularly see people stay silent rather than speak up when they disagree. Leaders want the truth. Employees still don’t feel safe giving it. That gap is the whole problem, playing out in real time, in nearly every organization running a version of this same disconnect.
Galindo’s view treats accountability as inseparable from trust, and trust isn’t something you install with a new policy. It’s built through repetition, specifically the repetition of a leader doing what they said they’d do, saying what’s actually true even when a softer version would be easier, and owning outcomes instead of explaining them away. A mandate skips all of that. It tries to shortcut years of behavior with a document, and people can tell the difference immediately.
What Leaders Must Do
So if another policy won’t fix it, what will? Galindo’s answer starts with looking at yourself before looking at the org chart. Before rolling out anything new, ask some honest questions. What are the conversations you need to have that you are not having? Where have you let a missed deadline slide because addressing it felt awkward? Where have you blamed “the culture” when the real answer is that you haven’t done the thing you’re asking others to do?
From there, the work is specific and repeatable. Pick one behavior you want to see more of, whether that’s owning mistakes openly, giving direct feedback, or following through on commitments without being reminded, and do it consistently, especially in the moments where it would be easier not to. Consistency matters more than any single big gesture. One dramatic apology after a major failure means less than a steady pattern of small, honest corrections over time.
None of this is comfortable, and it isn’t supposed to be. The irony is hard to miss. Leaders want their teams to face hard truths while avoiding their own, and the numbers above show just how common that avoidance is, even among people whose job is to lead.
Culture Isn’t Written, It’s Repeated
Accountability was never going to come from a document. Culture is built by what leaders actually do, over and over, not by what gets printed once and filed away. A mandate might change what people write on a form. It won’t change what they believe about whether it’s safe to be honest, whether mistakes are survivable, or whether the person above them plays by the same rules they hand down.
If an organization genuinely wants people who take ownership instead of people who just go through the motions, the work starts at the top, and it starts with the truth, spoken out loud, especially when it’s inconvenient. Linda Galindo has spent her career helping leaders do exactly that.
Ready to stop managing compliance and start building ownership? Explore Linda Galindo’s Accountability Framework, executive coaching, and keynote offerings, and take the first step toward a culture built on trust instead of paperwork.
