How Accountability Works

Accountability is one of the strongest forces we can put in place to help us be disciplined and pull us into taking positive action. But the reason it works is probably different than what you might have thought.

Humans respond to two great motivational forces: The pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain.

The latter, the avoidance of pain, is a much stronger force because it’s in reaction to threatened wellbeing and taps into our most basic needs for safety. Pleasure, however, is ‘nice to have’ and not a matter of life and death (and therefore has less power over us).

Accountability leverages the avoidance of pain by creating social confrontation. When you make a commitment to someone that you'll do something, you risk damaging that person's trust in you if you don’t follow through. Less trust means less belonging, and less belonging means less support in keeping you alive -  which was essential in humanity’s primitive history.

Knowing the value accountability offers, we can be more successful by implementing an accountability system. This is just a standard procedure for how you make commitments to someone and report back on how you did. And to support you in getting this to work for you, I wanted to share a few recommendations and best practices.

1) The best way to be a good accountability partner is to be accountable yourself. When you take your commitment seriously it demands the other person does the same and raises the stakes for being out of compliance.

2) Have a pre-determined consistent cadence for check ins so that expectations are set. The more specific and designed the system is, the more effective it will be

3) Provide supportive awareness and intervention for each other. It’s not necessarily about saying “You didn’t do good enough” but helping each other understand the conditions and circumstances that led to different choices and results. When you know better you can do better!

Darren Hardy calls accountability buddies a “peak performance partner”. Someone where built into the dynamic of the relationship is this extra focus of wanting to be the best that you can be. 

Accountability is one of the fastest ways to change your behavior, and if you aren’t accountable enough to yourself, then maybe it’s time to involve someone else. Send this to someone you want to be your “peak performance partner” as an invitation, and let’s get to work!