I'm going to say the uncomfortable thing first.

Before you redesign your accountability systems, your decision rights, your operating rhythms - you need to ask whether you have the right people in the roles those systems are designed to support.

Because no system, however well designed, produces accountability from people who were never going to be accountable.

Some people are not wired for ownership. They are comfortable executing what they're told, managing upward, and staying in their lane. That's not a character failure - it's a profile. And it's the wrong profile for a role that requires genuine accountability for outcomes.

If that's your problem, the solution is not a better accountability framework. It's a hiring and promotion problem that got dressed up as a culture problem. And until you name it, everything else you do will be treating the symptom.

The most expensive accountability failure I see in organisations is not a system failure.

It's a hiring failure that's been tolerated for long enough to become a culture problem.

 Fix the hiring. Then fix the system.

That said - and this is equally important - in most organisations I've worked with across the GCC, the accountability problem is not primarily a people problem.

It's a design problem.

And the two are not the same diagnosis, do not have the same solution, and should not be conflated. Which most organisations do. Constantly.

This article is about how to tell the difference - and what each one actually requires.

First: the hiring question you have to answer honestly

Before any conversation about accountability systems, ask three questions about the people in your accountability-critical roles:

1. Did they demonstrate genuine ownership in their previous roles - or did they demonstrate the ability to look like they did?
2. When things went wrong in their last organisation, did they surface the problem or manage it? Did they own the failure or explain it?
3. Do they currently behave differently when you're watching versus when you're not?

If the honest answers to those questions are uncomfortable, you don't have an accountability system problem. You have people in roles they shouldn't be in. And the accountability framework you're about to invest in will be used by those people to document why the outcomes they were responsible for weren't actually their fault.

This is not a pleasant thing to say. It is something I say to almost every leadership team I work with, because the alternative - investing in systems designed to extract accountability from people who aren't accountable - is the most expensive and least effective intervention in the people strategy toolkit.

Hire for accountability. Promote for accountability. Make it non-negotiable in your assessment process. Then design the system that supports the people who have it.

Second: the system problem that looks like a people problem

Assuming you have the right people - or you're in the process of getting there - the accountability gap is almost certainly a design failure.

Not a motivation failure. Not an attitude failure. A system failure.

Here is the single most important insight from behavioural science for this conversation:

People tend to behave exactly as the system is designed for them to behave.

If the system isn't designed for accountability, you will not get accountability -

regardless of how talented, motivated, or senior the people in it are.

The COM-B model of behaviour change - developed by Susan Michie and colleagues at University College London - establishes that behaviour requires three conditions simultaneously: Capability, Opportunity, and Motivation. Remove any one and the behaviour doesn't happen.

Most accountability interventions address Motivation. Performance management. Clarity of expectation. Leadership development. These are not wrong - but they are insufficient if Opportunity is absent.

Opportunity is the structural condition that makes the behaviour possible. 

Decision rights. Incentive alignment. Operating rhythms. Information flows. The environment that either enables accountability or prevents it, regardless of how motivated the person is.

Four structural failures produce almost every accountability gap we diagnose:

Unclear decision rights.

Nobody is certain who actually owns a decision. People wait, defer, and avoid committing - not because they don't care about the outcome, but because the system hasn't made clear that the outcome is theirs to own. Bain & Company's research found that organisations with clearly designed decision rights are 6x more likely to be high performers. The accountability problem, in most cases, starts here.

Competing priorities with no resolution mechanism.

People are accountable for outcomes that require other people's cooperation - and when those people's priorities compete, there is no designed mechanism for resolution. In a GCC organisation with a multicultural leadership team, this is not an edge case. It is daily operational reality. When a person cannot deliver their accountable outcome because a dependency hasn't been met and there is no escalation path, what looks like lack of accountability is a rational response to an impossible situation.

Incentives that reward the wrong behaviour.

This is the most insidious failure because it is the most invisible. The organisation says it values long-term thinking but promotes the people who hit short-term numbers regardless of how. It says it values speaking up but the person who raised the uncomfortable truth in last quarter's review was quietly sidelined. 

System 1 - the unconscious system that governs 95% of behaviour - reads what actually gets rewarded. Not the values poster. What happened to real people when they behaved in the ways the organisation claims to value.

Operating rhythms that prevent feedback loops.

Accountability requires timely information about whether you're on track. In many organisations, the operating rhythm makes this impossible: reviews happen quarterly, data arrives after the decision window has closed, and the people who need to act on problems are several layers removed from the people who can see them. Accountability becomes retrospective - a post-mortem exercise rather than an active performance mechanism.

The Research

Michie, S. et al. (2011). The Behaviour Change Wheel - COM-B model. Implementation Science, 6(42). Bain & Company (2016). Decision Insights - 6x performance advantage for organisations with clear decision rights. Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow — System 1 behaviour shaped by environment not intention. Edmondson, A.C. (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams.

Third: the GCC dimension that makes both problems harder

Both the hiring problem and the system problem are amplified in the GCC by three specific contextual factors.

The multicultural decision-making dynamic.

In a GCC organisation with a leadership team spanning multiple nationalities, the relationship with decision-making authority varies significantly by cultural background. Cultures with high power distance norms - which characterise much of the GCC workforce - tend toward upward deferral. Western professionals in the same team expect participative decision-making and read upward deferral as lack of initiative. Neither is wrong. Both are culturally shaped. And neither produces clarity without deliberate decision rights design that accounts for both.

The pace of growth has outrun the design.

The GCC has grown at a pace that has consistently outrun the design of the organisations operating within it. The accountability structures and decision rights designed for 200 people have been stretched - not redesigned - to accommodate 800. The accountability gap most GCC leadership teams are experiencing is not a failure of people. It is a failure of organisational infrastructure to keep pace with organisational scale.

Psychological safety is lower than leadership thinks.

In high-context, hierarchical cultures - which describe much of the GCC workforce - the signals that tell people whether it is safe to surface problems travel through relationship and observation, not through policy. A leadership team that has not invested in genuine psychological safety will find that accountability problems are managed upward rather than surfaced honestly. People tell leadership what it wants to hear. That is not an accountability failure. That is a rational response to an environment that has made honesty feel dangerous.

82%

of senior leaders say decisions in their organisation are frequently second-guessed, slowed,

or revisited - a direct consequence of unclear decision rights and accountability structures.

(McKinsey Organisational Health, 2023)

How to tell which problem you actually have

The diagnostic question is simple. Uncomfortable, but simple.

When something goes wrong in your organisation - when a target is missed, a deadline slips, a client relationship fractures - what actually happens next?

If the conversation is about who is responsible and what the consequence will be - and if the answer to 'who' always seems to be a specific person or group - you probably have a hiring problem dressed as an accountability problem. The system is being used to assign blame rather than to surface and fix the structural failure.

If the conversation is about what happened and why - and if honest examination reveals unclear ownership, competing priorities, misaligned incentives, or information that arrived too late - you have a design problem. And the people in it are behaving exactly as the system is designed for them to behave.

In most organisations, the honest answer is both. There are people in roles they shouldn't be in. And the system around them was never designed to produce the accountability that's being demanded.

Fixing one without the other will always underdeliver.

The organisations that solve the accountability problem are not the ones that demand more from their people or redesign their systems in isolation. They are the ones honest enough to address both simultaneously - and disciplined enough to sequence the work correctly. Hire right first. Then design the system that supports the people you've hired.

Where to start

People & Culture Audit  ·  CultureX + OrgX

If accountability is a persistent challenge - and you want to understand whether it's a hiring problem, a design problem, or both - the CultureX People & Culture Audit identifies exactly where the failures are. Commercially grounded. Evidence-based. Board-ready.

→ talentx.global/cultureX

Leadership Discovery  ·  LeadX

If the diagnostic points to hiring and promotion decisions that need to change - the LeadX Leadership Discovery gives you a data-backed picture of leadership capability across your organisation. Who is accountable by nature. Who isn't. And what that's costing.

→ talentx.global/leadx

Both conversations are with a Senior talentX Advisor to gain clarity on what’s possible.

Danielle Blizzard is the Founder and CEO of talentX, a people and culture consultancy operating across the UAE, KSA, and the wider GCC.

talentx.global  ·  hello@talentx.global