Building Accountability

Most management advice assumes there’s one right way to build accountability in teams. You’ll often hear that teams need “productive tension” or “healthy conflict” to perform at their best. But the reality is more nuanced: high-performing teams can take very different paths to achieve the same outcomes of trust, engagement, and accountability.

Some teams thrive on passionate debate and structured challenge. Others deliver exceptional results through positive energy, good faith assumptions, and natural collaboration. The key isn’t choosing the “right” approach. It’s understanding what works for your specific team and context, while avoiding the dysfunctions that plague underperforming groups.

The Real Problem: Disengagement, Not Lack of Debate

The core issue facing most teams isn’t that they avoid disagreement. It’s that they’re disengaged. Patrick Lencioni, in “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team,” focuses primarily on management and leadership challenges, identifying dysfunction patterns that leaders must address to build effective teams. His framework highlights how leadership behavior creates the conditions for team success or failure.

While Lencioni’s model is valuable for understanding leadership-level dysfunction, it doesn’t necessarily prescribe how individual team members should interact day-to-day. The underlying thread in his work is that teams (and their leaders) don’t care enough about their shared mission to invest in difficult conversations, whether those conversations involve debate or deeper collaboration.

Dysfunction shows up in multiple forms: teams that avoid all tension AND teams that engage in destructive personal attacks both fail to achieve results. Similarly, teams can succeed through different approaches: some through vigorous debate, others through positive alignment and mutual support.

The question isn’t whether your team debates enough. It’s whether they’re genuinely invested in shared success and willing to address whatever stands in the way of that success.

Two Paths to High Performance

The Debate-Driven Path

Some teams naturally gravitate toward challenge and structured disagreement. These teams tend to excel with approaches like:

Challenging ideas openly. Team members feel comfortable questioning assumptions, pushing back on proposals, and playing devil’s advocate. They separate ego from ideas and see intellectual challenge as a form of respect.

Creating formal debate structures. These teams benefit from structured decision-making processes that require multiple perspectives, formal review sessions, and designated roles for challenging the status quo.

Embracing competitive energy. A certain level of intellectual competition energizes these teams and drives them toward better solutions.

This approach works particularly well when teams have diverse backgrounds, high-stakes decisions, or naturally competitive personalities. It’s also effective in contexts where groupthink has been a historical problem.

The Collaboration-Driven Path

Other teams achieve the same accountability outcomes through positive energy and collaborative approaches:

Building on good faith assumptions. These teams start from the premise that everyone wants to succeed and has valuable contributions. They create space for concerns to emerge naturally rather than forcing confrontation.

Focusing on shared excitement and engagement. When team members are genuinely excited about their work and aligned on goals, they naturally raise issues and seek improvements without needing structured conflict.

Emphasizing psychological safety and trust. These teams invest heavily in creating environments where people feel safe to be vulnerable, admit mistakes, and ask for help. Issues surface through support rather than challenge.

Leveraging natural self-reflection. Team members who are engaged and care about quality often identify problems and improvements on their own, especially when they feel supported rather than challenged.

This approach often works exceptionally well with teams that have aligned values, creative work that benefits from positive energy, or cultural contexts that value harmony and consensus.

The Key Principles Behind Both Approaches

Regardless of which path your team takes, certain underlying principles drive accountability and performance:

Genuine care about shared outcomes. Whether teams achieve this through debate or collaboration, members must be invested in collective success, not just individual performance.

Psychological safety to address issues. People need to feel safe raising concerns, admitting mistakes, or suggesting improvements. This safety can come through supportive collaboration or respectful challenge.

Clarity about standards and expectations. High-performing teams have clear agreements about quality, behavior, and results. How they maintain these standards varies, but the standards themselves must be explicit.

Regular feedback and course correction. Teams need mechanisms for identifying and addressing problems. Some do this through formal challenge processes, others through ongoing supportive check-ins.

Trust that enables vulnerability. Whether built through working through disagreement or through positive collaboration, trust allows team members to be honest about struggles and seek help.

Choosing Your Team’s Approach

Rather than forcing your team into a predetermined model, consider these factors when determining what approach will work best:

Team composition and personalities. Some people thrive on intellectual challenge, while others perform best in supportive, collaborative environments. Pay attention to what energizes your specific team members.

Cultural context. Different organizational and cultural backgrounds have varying comfort levels with direct challenge versus collaborative problem-solving.

Nature of the work. Creative work might benefit from positive, supportive energy, while analytical or high-risk decisions might require more structured challenge.

Historical patterns. Teams with a history of conflict avoidance might benefit from more structured debate, while teams prone to personal conflict might need more emphasis on positive collaboration.

Current performance. If your team is already delivering excellent results through positive collaboration, there may be no need to introduce tension. If they’re struggling with groupthink or complacency, more challenge might help.

Warning Signs Regardless of Approach

Certain dysfunction patterns are problematic regardless of whether your team tends toward debate or collaboration:

Avoidance of all difficult conversations. Whether through confrontation or support, teams must be willing to address problems. Pure avoidance helps no one.

Personal attacks or destructive behavior. Challenge should focus on ideas and outcomes, never on character or worth. Collaboration should maintain respect for all perspectives.

Lack of genuine engagement. Going through the motions of either debate or collaboration without real investment in outcomes leads to mediocrity.

Missing feedback loops. Teams need ways to identify when they’re off track, whether through formal challenge or ongoing check-ins.

Absence of clear standards. Without shared expectations about quality and behavior, neither approach can drive accountability.

The Leader’s Role: Adapt to Your Team

As a leader, your job isn’t to impose one approach but to understand what enables your specific team to thrive:

Observe what energizes your team. Do they seem more engaged and creative in collaborative, supportive environments, or do they light up during intellectual debates and challenges?

Experiment with different approaches. Try both structured debate sessions and collaborative problem-solving approaches. Pay attention to which generates better ideas and stronger engagement.

Model the behavior you want to see. If your team thrives on positive collaboration, demonstrate vulnerability, support, and good faith assumptions. If they need more challenge, show how to disagree respectfully and focus on ideas rather than personalities.

Address dysfunction quickly. Regardless of your team’s natural approach, intervene when you see avoidance, personal attacks, or disengagement.

Stay focused on outcomes. The measure of success isn’t whether your team debates or collaborates. It’s whether they consistently deliver excellent results while maintaining trust and engagement.

Multi-Layered Dysfunction

One of the most complex challenges organizations face is when dysfunction exists at different layers simultaneously. You might have a team that operates beautifully through positive collaboration and delivers excellent results, while the leadership layer above them struggles with strategic paralysis, unclear priorities, or avoidance of difficult decisions.

This creates a situation where different parts of the organization need different interventions:

Team Level: Preserve What Works. If your execution teams are thriving through collaborative approaches, maintain that dynamic. Don’t introduce artificial tension or challenge processes that could disrupt their effective working relationships and positive energy.

Strategic Level: Address Leadership Dysfunction. This is where frameworks like Lencioni’s “Five Dysfunctions” become most relevant, as they’re designed specifically for management and leadership challenges. The leadership layer might need more structured approaches to break through strategic avoidance:

• Structured strategy sessions with designated devil’s advocate roles to challenge assumptions about market positioning, resource allocation, or competitive strategy
• External perspectives to introduce fresh thinking when internal leadership has become too comfortable with the status quo
• Forced decision frameworks that require leaders to make difficult trade-offs they’ve been avoiding
• Regular strategic reviews where leaders must defend current direction and consider alternatives

Cross-Level Communication. Ensure that high-performing teams aren’t undermined by leadership dysfunction. Create clear channels for teams to surface strategic concerns while maintaining their collaborative culture. Sometimes the best strategic insights come from execution teams who see market realities most clearly.

This multi-layered approach recognizes that the same organization might need collaboration at one level and more structured challenge at another. The key is diagnosing where the actual dysfunction exists and targeting interventions appropriately, rather than applying blanket solutions across all levels.

The Bottom Line

High-performing teams can achieve accountability through multiple paths, and different organizational layers may need different approaches simultaneously. Some teams thrive on intellectual challenge and structured debate. Others excel through positive energy, good faith assumptions, and collaborative problem-solving. Both approaches can lead to the same outcomes: engaged members who care about shared success and are willing to address whatever stands in the way.

The key is understanding each group’s natural tendencies and current performance, then creating the conditions that enable them to do their best work. Don’t force productive tension into a team that already delivers through positive collaboration, and don’t avoid necessary strategic challenges when leadership is stuck in analysis paralysis.

Focus on the fundamentals at each level: genuine engagement, psychological safety, clear standards, regular feedback, and trust. How different parts of your organization achieve these fundamentals may vary based on their specific dysfunction patterns and performance levels.

The goal isn’t to follow a prescribed model. It’s to build an organization where every layer cares enough about shared success to address problems and pursue excellence, whether they do so through challenge or collaboration.