My guilty pleasure is reality TV. Fellow devotees, whether secret or loud and proud, will be aware the latest season of Married at First Sight Australia recently concluded.
This year, barely a commitment ceremony passed without a participant announcing they were ‘taking ownership of’ or ‘taking accountability for’ something they’d done. The ritual was the same each time. They looked sincere. They had tears in their eyes. They apologised. The experts nodded, their expressions caught somewhere between approval and cynicism.
And then, usually within the week, they repeated the behaviour.
Every time it happened, my meme-filled mind immediately served me Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” The participants were very good at publicly acknowledging their missteps and apologising for them, but the fact that they labelled this ‘taking ownership and accountability’ did not make it so.
Ownership means making change after a mistake: behaving differently, choosing differently, treating the people around you differently.
Accountability means accepting the consequences, not treating the apology as the end of the matter and expecting everyone else to do the same.
The same pattern plays out in organisations and even governments every day. A leader makes a mistake, misses something, handles something badly or walks into a problem they should have seen coming. Then comes the corporate version of the ritual. They acknowledge their failings, often with impressive candour and an air of humility. They use phrases like ‘I have listened to your feedback’ and ‘I hear you’. They apologise, usually in public or in an ‘all staff’ email. Many read it as sincere. Cynical colleagues dismiss it as performative and recall the same thing happening last year over coffee in the staff room.
And then the conditions that produced the mistake remain exactly as they were.
With the benefit of hindsight, many leaders will recognise situations in which they have done this themselves, particularly early in their career. I am one of them.
Acknowledgement and apology tell people you understand what happened. Ownership requires action. It means changing course, restructuring a process, or having the conversation you’ve been avoiding. Accountability means accepting the consequences of your actions, even when they prove more significant or longer lasting than you’d like.
Organisations often reward the performance of accountability without requiring the substance of it. If acknowledgement and apology are enough to close the loop, there is little incentive to actually change anything. That means individual leaders need to draw on their own ethics to do the right thing, even when the system doesn’t require it.
In schools, where we talk constantly about instilling these qualities in our students, we need to practise what we teach.