Accountability That Speeds a Business Up

Accountability is doing what you say you are going to do, by when you said you would do it. That is the definition Jude Olinger, a Bloom Growth coach who works with owners through Entrepreneurs' Organization, gave us on our podcast, and it is the most useful one we have heard. It starts with the person at the top, it runs on a weekly rhythm, and when a team has it, the business moves faster.

A Word That Gets Used as a Hammer

Few words get used as loosely in business as accountability. When an owner says "I'm going to hold you accountable," most people hear a threat. When a project slips, "that person wasn't accountable" is often a way of placing blame on whoever is closest.

Jude's framing turns the word around. Accountability begins with the leader holding themselves to a standard: I said I would do it, so I do it. Modeling that behavior sets the expectation for everyone else. The commitments have to be reasonable, too. Holding someone to a promise they could never keep is unfair, and it teaches the team that commitments are negotiable.

In practice, a healthy version sounds like this: I am doing my part, I expect you to do yours, and that is the kind of organization we are. The commitments are specific and measurable, so there is never a debate about whether something got done.

Grant Trust First, Then Build Accountability on Top of It

Jude asks leadership teams a simple question. Do you earn trust, or do you grant it? Almost everyone says trust has to be earned. Then he asks how long that takes. The answer is usually 12 to 18 months.

A growing business cannot wait that long every time someone joins the team or takes on a new role. Jude's approach is to grant the trust up front and layer accountability on top of it. The leader extends trust, the team member commits to specific work, and both sides can see each week whether the commitments are being kept. Trust gets confirmed by results instead of by the calendar.

This matters most for owners trying to delegate. A business that depends on its owner usually has one of two problems: there is no team to delegate to, or the owner does not hand the work off to the team that exists. Delegation requires trust, and trust without accountability turns into hope. The two have to work together.

The Weekly Meeting Where Accountability Happens

Jude coaches a 90-minute weekly leadership meeting with a fixed agenda. Most of its sections are short on purpose, so the bulk of the time goes where it matters.

• Check-in, five minutes. Good news, business or personal.
• Quarterly priorities, five minutes. Each leader reads their priority out loud and declares it on track, off track, or done. On track gets no discussion. Done gets celebrated and dropped. Off track moves down the agenda to be worked on as a team.
• To-dos. The three to five commitments each person made last week, reviewed one by one.
• Headlines, five minutes. Short updates, no discussion.
• Obstacles and opportunities, about 60 minutes. The real work of the meeting: a running list of what is blocking the team and what could move it faster, solved in priority order.

Two habits make the to-do section work. Every to-do is sized to seven days. When someone says a task will take two weeks, Jude's question is how much of it can get done in seven. And the teams that move fastest complete 90 percent or more of their to-dos every week.

The other habit is honesty about capacity. If someone cannot take on a commitment this week, the right answer is to say so: "I'm full, I can't take it this week, but I can next week." That answer gets recorded so the work comes back around. A missed commitment that nobody flagged does far more damage than an honest no.

The language matters as well. Some operating systems call the list "issues." Bloom Growth calls it obstacles and opportunities, which keeps the conversation focused on what the team wants to achieve. As Alex put it, how we name things affects how we feel about them, and how we feel affects how we act.

Busy Is Different From Making Progress

It is human nature to feel productive by staying busy. Jude admitted to carrying around a bag of returned Christmas cards for most of a year, meaning to update the mailing list. Sorting them would have felt like work while moving nothing that mattered.

Part of accountability is prioritization. Do the most important thing first, even when it feels like the hardest one, and everything after it tends to get easier. Alex shared a point that has stuck with him: the word priority was originally singular. A team can have many tasks, and still only one thing that matters most this week. When everything is a priority, nothing is.

Jude adds a warning about the stories teams tell themselves. Under pressure, people slip into all-or-nothing thinking: this will either be a spectacular success or a total failure. Most decisions are lower stakes than that, especially when the team will revisit them next week. Tracking real progress against the goal, every week, keeps the facts ahead of the stories.

Ready Is a Myth

Connor Lacy, a principal at The McFarland Group, described a habit many careful people share: wanting to think through everything before sending anything out. The time goes into guessing at reactions nobody has seen yet. Getting the work to a professional standard, something you will stand behind, and then getting real feedback is faster and usually produces a better result.

Jude's version of the same idea comes from a sign in his coffee shop: ready is a myth. Start messy, start scared, start anyway. If you are launching rockets, you need that level of precision. Most of what a leadership team is waiting on can start now and improve as it goes.

Alex added the part that rings true for a lot of owners. For a long time, his fear of failure never looked like fear. It looked like making things more complicated, so the work never quite got out the door.

Why This Shapes What a Business Is Worth

When we built the Transferable Value Index, we took it ourselves first. The McFarland Group landed in the owner-dependent quadrant: high durability, low owner independence. We wrote about what that taught us in What We Learned Scoring Our Own Firm on the Transferable Value Index.

Accountability is one of the most direct ways to change that score. A business that someone else will want to own, whether an outside buyer, a management team, or the next generation, has to run without everything flowing through one person. That requires a team with clear priorities, honest communication, and the habit of finishing what it commits to. As Jude put it, the goal is a high-performing organization that communicates, executes, and makes decisions, so the business is not all about the owner.

That work starts well before any sale, with how the leadership team meets next Monday. Owners thinking about what comes next can start with the people and habits that will carry the business forward, which is also where leadership development and succession planning begin.

We talked through these ideas with Jude Olinger and Connor Lacy on an episode of our podcast, What Transfers.