Shared accountability, leading without authority and other funny corporate myths.

Dec 02, 2025

Every company I’ve worked with loves this romantic mantra: “We’re all in this together.” Shows up in all-hands meetings, company values on the wall, what leadership says when rallying people around difficult goals.

There’s truth in it. Good work requires collaboration. No one succeeds alone in complex organizations building complex products.

But watch what happens when things go wrong. Suddenly it’s not “we” anymore. It’s you.

The product didn’t hit targets? That’s on the PM who was “accountable” for growth. The launch didn’t go well? That’s on the marketing lead who was supposed to “influence” the product team. The customer experience is fragmented? That’s on the person with “customer experience” in their title, even though seven different teams touch the customer journey and none of them report to that person.

The shared accountability was very real when celebrating. Became remarkably individual when allocating blame.

The influence myth

“You don’t need direct authority, you just need to influence the right stakeholders.” “Great leaders lead through influence, not positional power.” “This is a chance to develop your influencing skills.”

Influence matters. Being able to build relationships, make compelling cases, bring people along, these are real skills.

But influence is not a substitute for authority. It’s a complement to it.

Influence works when people want to be influenced. When their incentives align with yours. When they respect your expertise and trust your judgment. When helping you helps them.

Influence fails when none of those conditions exist. When the engineering team has their own roadmap and your project isn’t on it. When the sales team has their own targets and your initiative doesn’t move them closer. When the executive who controls the budget thinks your area isn’t strategic.

You can be the most influential person in the world, and if the structural incentives don’t support what you’re trying to do, you’re going to fail. Or exhaust yourself trying not to fail.

Power isn’t about fancy titles. It’s about who controls resources, who makes decisions, who can say no and make it stick. When you give someone accountability without power, you’re setting them up to either fail or burn enormous political capital trying to succeed. That capital runs out.

What real ownership actually looks like

A 70% good plan with a clear owner beats a “collaborative” one any day.

I’ve seen strategies that everyone contributed to, socialized across fifteen stakeholders, with buy-in from all the right people. But if no one actually owns execution, if decisions still require consensus, if resources still need negotiating case-by-case, that strategy gets diluted and delayed until it’s unrecognizable.

Meanwhile, rougher strategies with clear ownership deliver real outcomes because someone can make decisions and move resources without building consensus every time.

Real ownership includes decision rights. Can you actually decide, or do you need to “align” with eight other people before anything moves? If every decision requires a committee, you don’t own anything.

Real ownership includes resource control. Can you allocate people, budget, or engineering capacity? Or do you need to negotiate for those things from people who have different priorities? If you’re constantly begging for resources, you don’t own the outcome.

Real ownership includes priority setting. Can you say no to things that don’t serve the goal? Or do you have to accommodate everyone’s requests because you don’t have authority to push back? If you can’t protect focus, you don’t own the strategy.

Real ownership includes consequence authority. When things aren’t working, can you change course? When people aren’t delivering, can you address it? Or do you need to escalate to someone else who has actual authority? If you can’t course correct, you don’t own the execution.

Most “accountability” in organizations doesn’t include any of these things. It’s accountability for outcomes without authority over inputs. Setting someone up to fail and then blaming them for the failure.

The gaslighting frame

What makes this insidious is how it’s framed as developmental. “This is a chance to develop your leadership skills without formal authority.” “If you can make this work, imagine what you could do with actual authority.”

This puts the burden on the individual. Suggests that if they’re struggling, it’s because they’re not good enough yet at influencing or leading or building relationships.

Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes people do need better influencing skills.

Most of the time, the problem isn’t the person. It’s the structure.

Put even the most skilled influencer in a situation where incentives don’t support what they’re trying to do, where power dynamics work against them, where organizational structure creates competing priorities, they’re going to struggle too.

I’ve worked with talented growth and product leaders who were “accountable” for driving revenue or activation or retention. Didn’t control the product roadmap, the engineering capacity, the sales process, the pricing. But accountable for the outcome.

When the numbers didn’t move, they were told they needed to be more strategic, more influential, better at stakeholder management. Not that the organization had set them up in an impossible position. Not that the structure was broken. Just that they personally needed to be better.

That’s taking a systemic problem and making it feel like an individual deficiency.

Why this keeps happening

Shared accountability protects leadership from making hard decisions.

Giving someone real ownership means making choices. Deciding this initiative is more important than that one. Giving someone authority that comes from somewhere, which means taking it from somewhere else. Potentially creating conflict between teams or functions.

Shared accountability avoids all of that. Everyone gets involved. No one gets told their thing is less important. No one gives up control. We all “collaborate” and “figure it out together.”

Feels safer and more harmonious. Until it doesn’t work, at which point leadership can point to the person who was nominally accountable and suggest they should have influenced more effectively.

Organizational risk avoidance masquerading as empowerment and teamwork.

The cost is enormous. Projects move slowly or not at all. Talented people burn out trying to make broken structures work. The organization loses credibility with those people, who leave and tell everyone this place is dysfunctional. Meanwhile, the structural problems never get fixed because we keep treating them as individual performance issues.

If you’re stuck in this

If you’re in one of these “accountable without authority” situations right now, you have options. None of them are perfect, but they’re better than pretending the structure will fix itself.

Get explicit about what you actually control. Have a direct conversation with your manager about decision rights, resource control, consequence authority. Not confrontational, just clarifying. “I want to make sure I understand what I can and can’t do here.” Get it documented if possible.

This conversation does one of two things. Either you find out you have more authority than you thought and you can actually use it. Or you confirm you don’t have the authority to succeed, which gives you information to work with.

Raise structural issues early, not late. If you’re seeing that you need X to deliver Y and you don’t have access to X, say so now. Not as complaining, as risk flagging. “I’m seeing this gap. How should we handle it?”

Most people wait too long because they’re trying to prove they can handle it. Waiting means the problem compounds and you’ve already burned credibility on something that won’t work.

Protect your narrative. Document what you control and what you don’t. Make constraints visible. When you update on progress, include what’s blocking things and who owns unblocking them. Not victim mentality, just transparency.

This matters when accountability conversations happen later. You’ve already made clear where the structural problems are.

Decide if it’s worth it. Sometimes these situations are temporary or the upside justifies the frustration. Sometimes they’re not. You get to choose what you’re willing to tolerate and for how long. But choose actively instead of drifting.

Staying in a structurally broken situation for years while it erodes your confidence and reputation is the worst outcome. Some people make it work. Some leave. Some renegotiate. All of those are legitimate. The point is deciding consciously what you’re doing and why, not just enduring and hoping it gets better.

The reality

If everyone’s responsible, no one’s responsible. If everyone owns it, no one owns it. If we’re all driving together, the bus stays in park.

Collaboration is essential. Good work requires input from multiple people, diverse perspectives, genuine collaboration. But collaboration needs a frame. Needs someone who can synthesize input, make decisions, allocate resources, and own outcomes. Without that, you just have people talking about what should happen while nothing actually happens.

Next time you hear “we’ll figure it out together,” ask who’s actually going to make the decisions. Who controls the resources. Who can say no. Who owns success and who owns failure.

If the answer isn’t clear, neither is the path forward.

The most ridiculous setup I’ve seen? An initiative requiring collaboration from six teams, each with different roadmaps and different executives. The “owner” was a senior PM with no direct reports and no budget, expected to “influence” teams to reprioritize their work to support the initiative. They were reviewed on whether the initiative hit its goals. None of the six team leads were reviewed on whether they supported it.

It failed. The PM was told they needed to work on their influencing skills.

That person left six months later. The org chart stayed exactly the same, ready to burn out whoever came next.