Strategic Discipline Blog

In Propeller: Accelerating Change by Getting Accountability Right, authors Tanner Corbridge, Jared Jones, Craig Hickman, and Tom Smith outline two distinct definitions of accountability that shape an organization's culture.

Two Cultures of Accountability

According to the authors, organizations fall into one of two accountability mindsets:

1. Accountability as Explanation, Justification, and Punishment

“Subject to having to report, explain, or justify; liable; responsible; answerable.”

2. Accountability as Ownership for Results

“A personal choice to rise above one’s circumstances and demonstrate the ownership necessary for achieving desired results—to See It, Own It, Solve It, and Do It.”

These two mindsets shape everything: collaboration, problem-solving, innovation, feedback, and growth.

What Does a Culture of Accountability Look Like?

Here’s how the authors compare the two cultures:

Which column feels more like your organization?

Defining What Matters: Key Results

In Propeller, the authors explain that real accountability starts with clearly defining results. They call these Key Results—the few, high-priority outcomes that everyone in the organization is aligned around.

Effective Key Results are:

• Meaningful – Everyone can connect their daily work to them.
• Measurable – Defined by one metric, one category, and a clear target.
• Memorable – There should only be 3–5 of them.

Without clarity on Key Results, alignment crumbles—and excuses thrive.

The Anatomy of an Excuse

Here’s another lens to look through. Ask yourself:

Do you recognize these traits in your team—or yourself?

The Anatomy of an Excuse:

• Shifts blame and projects negativity
• Demands perfection in others but is lenient with self
• Focuses on other people’s deficiencies

Excuses disconnect us from accountability. They keep us stuck.

Change Begins With You

In Change Your Mind. Create New Results, we teach that change begins with self-awareness.

If you're trying to fix your life or business with the same thinking that created the problem, you're just rehearsing the past. It’s why change feels so hard—our bodies are addicted to our old habits, our old excuses.

The first step to change is becoming aware of your unconscious patterns—your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

You have 60,000 to 70,000 thoughts per day. 90–95% of them are the same as yesterday’s. That means unless you become conscious of your thoughts, you're simply living out the familiar past—and excusing yourself from creating a better future.

Leaders Must Go First

If you’re the leader—and you’re not accountable—nothing will change.

Leadership sets the tone. If you tolerate blame, excuses, or avoidance at the top, they will cascade through the culture. But when you lead with ownership, the culture shifts.

As the saying goes:

The most unprofitable thing ever manufactured is an excuse.

A Framework for Sustainable Change

Change Your Mind. Create New Results is a neuroscience-based, 13–15 hour workshop (depending on group size) that helps leaders and teams:

• Understand why change is hard—and how to overcome it
• Identify their subconscious patterns that sabotage success
• Practice tools to make change conscious, actionable, and sustainable
• Use a 30-day Genius Journal to build new habits and routines

You've changed before. You can do it again. This program helps you understand how you did it—and how to repeat and sustain that success.

Ready to Create a Culture of Accountability?

If you're ready to move from excuses to ownership—let’s talk.

📞 Contact Positioning Systems
Schedule a free, exploratory conversation and discover how to build a high-accountability culture that aligns everyone around results.

Stop explaining—and start executing.

Growth demands Strategic Discipline.

The pace of change has never been faster—and it’s only accelerating. Many people today feel overwhelmed, anxious, and uncertain about the future. But as futurist Alvin Toffler warned back in 1970 in Future Shock, “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

Change is no longer optional—it’s a leadership skill, a cultural advantage, and a business imperative. In next week’s blog, we’ll explore how you and your organization can stop fearing change—and start mastering it.

Building an enduring great organization requires disciplined people, disciplined thought, disciplined action, superior results, producing a distinctive impact on the world.

Discipline sustains momentum over a long period of time, laying the foundations for lasting endurance.

A winning habit starts with 3 Strategic Disciplines: Priority, Metrics, and Meeting Rhythms.   Forecasting, accountability, individual, and team performance improve dramatically.

Meeting Rhythms achieve a disciplined focus on performance metrics to drive growth.

Let Positioning Systems help your business achieve these outcomes on the four most Important Decisions your business faces:

Positioning Systems helps mid-sized ($5M - $500M+) businesses Scale-UP. We align your business to focus on Your One Thing! Contact dwick@positioningsystems.com to Scale Up your business! Take our Four Decisions Needs Assessment to discover how your business measures against other Scaled Up companies. We’ll contact you.

NEXT BLOG –Change - Today’s Most Critical Learning Skill