Last week, I spent an afternoon working with the leadership team of a third-generation family-owned business. The newest person in the room had been there ten years, and the longest-tenured had been there forty-five.
That kind of history creates a lot of good things: loyalty, familiarity, trust, a sense of shared identity. These are people who genuinely like one another, who have worked side by side for years, in some cases decades, and who know far more about each other than most coworkers ever will.
It can also make accountability really hard.
As we talked about why, I heard variations of things I’ve heard from leaders for years: “They’ve been here forever.” “I like the people I work with.” “Sometimes it’s just easier for me to do it myself.”
None of those statements sound especially alarming. In fact, they sound almost kind. Who wants to be the person constantly criticizing someone they care about? Who wants to make a longtime employee feel like their contributions suddenly don’t matter? And if you can fix the problem yourself in ten minutes rather than spending an hour explaining it, fixing it yourself can feel both efficient and generous (and, let’s be honest, also satisfying).
Except that it often isn’t.
I’ve been thinking about this while reading Priya Parker’s The Art of Fighting, which pushes back on our tendency to equate healthy relationships with an absence of conflict. We have somehow absorbed the idea that if a group is functioning well, people should get along, conversations should stay comfortable, and disagreements should be relatively rare.
I think that we often mistake harmony for health.
Sometimes what looks like harmony is simply a room full of people who have become very skilled at not saying what needs to be said.
During the workshop, I asked one of the participants, Frank, who had taught him to ride a bike when he was a kid. He told me it was his older brother.
I asked him how his brother had done it, and Frank described the scene almost everyone can picture: his brother running behind him with a hand on the back of the seat, helping him find his balance while Frank pedaled.
“At some point, he let go,” Frank said.
I asked if he had ever fallen.
“Sure.”
So I asked the room what they would think if Frank rolled up today on a bicycle and his brother was still running behind him, hanging onto the seat.
They laughed, because of course they did. The image was ridiculous.
And yet, in leadership, we do some version of it all the time.
We step in before someone has to struggle with the problem. We redo work rather than explaining what needs to change. We absorb a missed deadline because calling attention to it feels uncomfortable. We tolerate the same behavior for years because the person has been with us forever. We tell ourselves we are protecting the relationship, when sometimes what we are really protecting is ourselves from having an awkward conversation.
It also connects, for me, to self-forgetfulness.
I usually talk about self-forgetfulness as the experience of getting outside ourselves: through awe, through community, through becoming absorbed in something larger than our own internal chatter. But I think there is another version of it that shows up in leadership.
Sometimes self-forgetfulness means being willing to stop centering our own discomfort.
Instead of asking, “How do I get through this conversation without upsetting anyone?” we ask, “What does this person actually need from me in order to grow?”
Those are very different questions. The first one encourages us to smooth, soften, rescue, avoid. The second one asks us to be useful, and being useful is not always the same thing as being nice.
Accountability, when it is done well, is not punishment. It is a form of belief. It says, “I think you are capable of more than this.” It says, “This standard matters, and so do you.” It says, “I respect you enough to tell you the truth rather than quietly compensating for you.”
That doesn’t mean every disagreement is noble, or that “I’m just being honest” gives anyone permission to be a jackass. We all know people who seem to enjoy the confrontation part quite a bit more than the growth part.
Good disagreement still requires care. It requires curiosity. It requires enough trust to say, “I don’t see this the way you do,” without turning that into, “There is something wrong with you (or with me).” It requires us to remember that challenge and belonging can coexist.
In fact, I think strong communities depend on it – and Priya Parker does too.
The best teams, organizations, and communities are not the ones where nobody disagrees. They are the ones where people trust the relationship enough to disagree honestly, knowing the relationship will still be there afterward.
The same is true of accountability.
Frank’s brother could have kept holding the seat forever. He could have made absolutely certain Frank never tipped over, never scraped a knee, never had the terrifying experience of realizing that no one was holding on anymore.
But then Frank would never have learned to ride. At some point, care required his brother to let go.
Leadership does too, because if we never let go, they never get to discover what they can do without us.