Transitioning from Personal to Organizational Accountability
It can’t be all about you.
You’ve figured out by now how much I love entrepreneurs. I love their passion, their relentless optimism, and their figure-it-out nature.
All of those qualities often make entrepreneurs natural leaders.
Through sheer force of will, or clarity of vision, or charismatic personality, they inspire and motivate their teams.
The best entrepreneurs have a ride-or-die team surrounding them. The kind of team willing to wear multiple hats, extend beyond their job descriptions, and do whatever it takes to move the company forward.
This is all great…until it isn’t.
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Personal relationships are powerful. When you have them with a small team, personal ties can help you get a whole lot done in the business.
People are more invested in the company’s success—and they don’t want to let the founder down.
That loyalty creates its own kind of accountability, the kind that doesn’t need frameworks or regular check-ins.
But what happens when you start to grow?
I’ve watched clients go from having a relationship with every individual in their company to barely recognizing a team member as one of their own.
- They step out of the hiring process.
- They don’t meet with them regularly.
- They focus on working through their leadership team to get things done.
These are good things for a business that wants to scale.
But growth has its tradeoffs. One of them is that the team no longer has the same level of attachment to the founder.
They aren’t doing this because they love you.
They’re doing it because it’s their job.
If personal loyalty stops being the motivation, what steps in to fill the void? It has to be something.
This, to me, is really when concepts like Mission become important. The team has to believe in something that is larger than any one person in the organization. The Mission is that overarching goal that collectively they can try to achieve.
What also becomes important is accountability. Those frameworks and check-ins you didn’t need before? Now they have to be formalized, process-driven, and consistent.
The incentives shift as you grow. The way you hold team members accountable needs to shift, too.
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I learned this lesson in one of my own companies a few years back. I’d always relied on “entrepreneurial spirit” as a proxy for hard work. When the team was small, it was effective. We hired people who were scrappy and worked their butts off.
But that business started to grow, and we hit this exact wall. We didn’t have structures for accountability in place, and in a larger company, it’s much easier to hide.
I’m not saying we had any bad people on board. In fact, I take responsibility. As the leader, I wasn’t setting them up with enough management structure to succeed. Nobody was asking them to achieve their full potential, so they weren’t. That’s just human nature. But we had to change it.
While chatting with a friend about this situation, they said something profound to me. “You’ve never really worked for anybody. So you don’t understand what it means to have a boss who makes you work every day.”
My friend was right. I had assumed my team wanted freedom, and that would be the right incentive to get them to work hard.
But not everyone is an entrepreneur (seriously, thank goodness).
Instead of chafing at management structure the way I would, many people thrive under it.
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A company bears the responsibility of getting employees excited and energized about the work they do every day—and holding them accountable for doing that work in a way that’s still respectful and even empowering.
Yes, the individual has a role as well. They have to be the right person (and in the right seat at the right time). But the company has to create the conditions for success.
It’s about much more than personal loyalty or the popularity of the CEO. As a business grows, things change. This transition can be unexpectedly difficult. But I never said growing was easy. Only that it’s worth it.
