Why holding managers accountable for outcomes they cannot meaningfully influence creates frustration, distorted behaviour and hidden organisational risk
Years ago, I remember a manager becoming deeply frustrated about his employee engagement results.
Like many managers, he was being held accountable for the engagement score of the people in his area. On the surface, that seems reasonable. Managers have an enormous influence on employee experience. The quality of the relationship people have with their immediate manager consistently matters.
But his frustration wasn’t really about being asked to take responsibility for his leadership.
It was about being held accountable for an outcome he could only partially control.
The CEO had recently done or said something that had upset employees. The consequences showed up in the engagement survey, including in this manager’s results.
His argument was essentially: What exactly am I supposed to do about that?
He could influence how he communicated with his team. He could recognise good work, provide feedback, support development, manage conflict and create a healthy local environment.
But he couldn’t control the CEO.
He couldn’t reverse enterprise decisions.
He couldn’t rewrite organisational policies.
He couldn’t necessarily change remuneration, resourcing or workload.
And yet all of those things could affect how his employees answered an engagement survey for which he was subsequently expected to produce an action plan.
The problem wasn’t accountability itself.
The problem was that accountability had travelled further than influence.
Accountability without authority is only part of the problem
“Accountability without authority” is hardly a new organisational problem.
Project managers have experienced it for decades. So have middle managers, HR leaders, change managers and anyone who has ever been told to deliver an outcome while depending on five other parts of the organisation to make it happen.
But authority doesn’t quite capture the whole issue.
A manager doesn’t necessarily need formal authority over every factor affecting an outcome. They may still be able to influence it.
They might have access to senior decision-makers. They might be consulted before decisions are made. They may be able to escalate an issue, challenge a priority, negotiate resources or influence the people who do have formal authority.
So the more useful question is not simply:
Do you have authority?
It is:
Do you have meaningful influence over the conditions that determine the outcomes for which you are held accountable?
I call this Accountability–Influence Alignment.
Accountability–Influence Alignment is the degree to which a person has sufficient authority, resources and organisational influence to affect the outcomes for which they are held responsible.
When accountability and influence are reasonably aligned, responsibility makes sense.
When they become badly misaligned, organisations create structural exposure.
The engagement survey problem
Employee engagement is a particularly good example because organisations frequently attribute engagement results to the nearest manager.
There is some logic to this. Managers unquestionably shape employee experience.
But employees don’t experience their manager in isolation.
They experience an organisation.
They experience executive decisions, organisational restructures, workload, technology, systems, career opportunities, remuneration, communication, job security, organisational justice, change and the behaviour of senior leaders.
Their immediate manager may influence some of those things strongly, some weakly and some not at all.
Yet when survey results arrive, we often divide them into teams, hand each manager their score and say:
Here’s your engagement result. What are you going to do about it?
That process contains an important assumption:
that the organisational location where a problem becomes visible is also the location where the problem was caused.
Those are not necessarily the same thing.
A manager may inherit the consequences of decisions made several layers above them.
A team may report low trust because of an enterprise restructure.
Employees may feel overloaded because vacancies have been deliberately left unfilled.
People may report poor communication because senior leaders have not explained the strategic rationale behind a major decision.
A manager can listen empathetically to all of those concerns. They may be able to buffer some of their impact.
But asking that manager to “fix engagement” can become an organisational sleight of hand.
The system creates the condition.
The survey detects the condition.
And accountability for changing the condition is transferred to someone with limited ability to influence its source.
This is bigger than employee engagement
The same pattern appears everywhere.
A manager is held accountable for employee wellbeing but cannot change staffing levels, deadlines or workload.
A project leader is accountable for delivery but cannot control the resources on which delivery depends.
A frontline employee is measured on customer satisfaction while working with systems and policies that repeatedly frustrate customers.
A middle manager is expected to build a positive culture while watching senior leaders behave in ways that contradict the stated values.
A leader is responsible for retaining talented people but has little influence over remuneration, career pathways or restructuring decisions.
An employee is responsible for the quality of an AI-assisted output but has limited ability to understand, alter or override the system that generated it.
In each case, accountability sits in one place while meaningful control over the conditions producing the outcome sits somewhere else.
That isn’t simply frustrating.
It changes behaviour.
What happens when accountability exceeds influence?
Imagine being repeatedly told that an outcome is your responsibility while learning through experience that you cannot materially alter many of the things determining it.
Eventually, something has to give.
Some managers become defensive. If they are going to be blamed for the number, they become highly invested in explaining why the number isn’t their fault.
Others push the accountability downward.
Pressure travels.
A senior leader demands an improvement from the manager. The manager, unable to alter the organisational conditions driving the problem, increases pressure on the team.
Some become cynical about organisational initiatives.
Others stop raising systemic problems because experience tells them nothing will change.
And some work increasingly hard trying to compensate personally for conditions they cannot fix structurally.
This is where the issue becomes particularly relevant to psychosocial safety.
Australian approaches to psychosocial risk increasingly recognise the importance of factors such as job demands, job control, role clarity, organisational justice, support and the management of organisational change.
Accountability–Influence misalignment can cut across several of these simultaneously.
The issue isn’t simply, “I have too much work.”
It can be:
I am expected to deliver an outcome, I can see what is preventing it, I am answerable when it fails, and I cannot influence the conditions that need to change.
That is a very different organisational experience.
The hidden ecology of accountability
This is one reason I have become increasingly interested in thinking about organisations as ecologies rather than machines.
In a machine metaphor, accountability looks relatively straightforward.
Break the organisation into units. Give each unit objectives. Assign accountability. Measure performance.
But organisations are not collections of independent components.
They are interdependent human systems.
An executive decision changes pressure somewhere else.
A new process removes work from one team and creates friction for another.
A restructure changes reporting lines but also changes trust, relationships, informal influence and access to information.
A new performance target alters behaviour beyond the metric being measured.
The CEO does something that damages trust and the effect appears three months later in a manager’s engagement score.
The ecology carries consequences across organisational boundaries.
That means accountability cannot be understood properly without tracing influence.
Four questions leaders should ask before assigning accountability
When an organisation holds someone accountable for an outcome, it needs to understand what actually determines that outcome.
The first question is what can this person directly control?
Those are the decisions, behaviours and resources genuinely within their authority.
The second is what can they meaningfully influence?
They may not control the decision, but perhaps they can shape it through consultation, escalation, relationships or access to decision-makers.
The third is what sits outside both their control and their meaningful influence?
These are inherited or systemic conditions. They may still affect the outcome enormously, but pretending the accountable person can fix them doesn’t make them controllable.
And the fourth question is the one organisations often neglect:
If the person identifies a systemic barrier, is there a credible pathway for that issue to travel to someone who can change it?
Without that pathway, accountability becomes trapped.
This changes how we should use culture and engagement data
There is a broader diagnostic lesson here.
When an engagement, culture or psychosocial survey identifies a problem, the first question should not automatically be:
What does the manager need to do?
It should be:
Where is this condition being produced?
That requires more than looking at a dashboard.
If workload is a problem, what is generating the workload?
If people don’t feel heard, where do decisions actually get made?
If employees don’t trust leadership, which experiences have taught them not to?
If managers aren’t communicating effectively, do they actually have the information people are asking them for?
If people feel powerless, which decisions affecting their work can they genuinely influence?
Sometimes the answer will absolutely sit with the local manager.
Managers are not passive victims of “the system”, and systemic thinking should never become an excuse for poor leadership.
But sometimes the highest-leverage intervention sits elsewhere.
Good organisational diagnosis has to be able to tell the difference.
Accountability should follow influence—not merely hierarchy
This has important implications for leadership.
We often tell managers to “take ownership”.
Ownership is valuable when it means refusing to be passive, exercising judgement and acting on what you can influence.
It becomes dangerous when it means accepting personal responsibility for systemic conditions while the people with genuine decision authority escape scrutiny.
Healthy accountability requires more precision.
A leader should be accountable for how they use the authority and influence available to them.
They should be expected to identify barriers they cannot resolve.
They should have credible pathways for escalating those barriers.
And senior leaders should retain accountability for the organisational conditions created by decisions that only they have the authority to make.
That is very different from simply pushing every outcome down the hierarchy.
The question isn’t “Who owns the number?”
Engagement scores are useful.
So are culture measures, customer metrics, psychosocial risk assessments, productivity indicators and performance targets.
But every metric simplifies a complex system.
The danger begins when we mistake the person closest to the number for the person who controls all the conditions producing it.
So the next time a dashboard turns red and someone asks:
“Who owns this?”
I think there is a better question:
Who has the influence to change what is producing it?
Because accountability without sufficient influence does not create ownership.
It creates exposure.
And if organisations want genuine accountability, they need to stop simply allocating responsibility and start examining whether accountability, authority and influence actually align.
About Ros
Rosalind Cardinal is the Founder and Managing Director of Shaping Change, an Australian leadership and organisational development consultancy.
With almost 40 years’ experience in organisational development, executive coaching and leadership consulting, Ros helps leaders and organisations navigate the hidden dynamics that shape culture, influence, decision-making and performance.
She is the creator of the Recognition Pathway™, Political Intelligence Compass™, Organisational Hidden Ecology™ and the Women’s Leader Archetypes™ framework.
Book a chat with Ros.
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