Performance Is Not The Leader’s Problem To Solve
Performance Is Not the Leader's Problem to Solve
This is the second in a series of four pieces examining the assumptions behind how organisations think about leadership accountability.
The first piece in this series looked at what Gallup's accountability data actually shows, and it left a question unresolved. If leaders already know accountability is their weakest area, why doesn't it improve? Part of the answer sits underneath the entire model Gallup uses to think about performance.
The claim buried in the model
Gallup's four leadership responsibilities, purpose, people, decisions, and performance, treat performance as something a leader produces. The article closes on a line worth reading twice. When expectations are clear, coaching is frequent, and accountability is consistent, performance can be measured and workplaces are wired for success.
That's a closed claim. It says performance is a function of leader behaviour. Get the leadership inputs right and the output follows. It reads cleanly, and that's exactly the problem with it.
What the model leaves out
Three things sit outside a leader's control and shape performance regardless of how well that leader leads.
The first is the individual. Gallup's model treats employee capability and capacity as constants a leader manages around. They aren't. A leader can set clear expectations, coach well, and hold someone accountable, and still meet the limits of what that person currently has the skill, experience, or bandwidth to deliver. Accountability doesn't create capability. It assumes it.
The second is the organisation. Resource constraints, structural dysfunction, competing priorities handed down from above, and the accumulated habits of a culture all shape what's achievable on a given team. A leader working inside a broken system is bounded by that system. Better leadership narrows the gap. It doesn't remove it.
The third is the environment. Market conditions, regulatory shifts, competitive pressure, and plain timing all affect what a team can produce. The same leader with the same team will get different results at different points in a market cycle. No accountability conversation adjusts for that.
Where the blame lands
There's a pattern behind this kind of model. When something goes wrong inside an organisation, responsibility tends to land on whoever is closest to the outcome rather than on whatever actually produced it. It's an understandable habit. The leader is visible. The system is diffuse, slow-moving, and harder to see. But locating the cause where it's easiest to point, rather than where it actually originates, distorts how organisations understand what's happening to them.
Peter Senge described a version of this dynamic in his work on organisational systems. When a problem sits deep in the structure of a system and is genuinely hard to fix at the root, organisations often reach for a more visible, more immediate intervention instead. It relieves pressure in the short term. But because it doesn't touch the actual cause, the underlying problem persists, and the organisation grows more dependent on the symptomatic fix over time. Leaning harder on leader accountability as the mechanism for improving performance risks being exactly this kind of intervention. It feels like a solution because it's actionable. That doesn't mean it addresses what's actually driving the outcome.
Why this connects back to the leaders who see it
This is where the split from the first piece becomes relevant again. The leaders who describe accountability as a technique problem tend to be reasoning inside the same closed model Gallup uses. Fix the leadership inputs, get the performance output. It's a coherent view if you accept the model's premise.
The leaders who describe something more textured, the uncertainty about what's fair to expect, the sense that conditions outside their control are shaping the outcome, are often intuiting exactly what this piece is describing. They've noticed that performance isn't fully theirs to determine, even without naming it in systems language. That intuition is closer to accurate. It's also harder to act on, because it doesn't come with a clean checklist.
None of this removes the leader from the picture. Clarity, relationships, and decisions still matter enormously. But treating the leader as the primary lever for performance sets organisations up to expect more from accountability than accountability can deliver. It also leaves leaders carrying responsibility for outcomes that were never fully within their control.
The next piece in this series looks at what happens when cause and effect themselves become difficult to trace, and what that means for how leaders are expected to act.
Chris Spinks is the director of NOBIS, an executive coaching and leadership development practice working with individuals, teams, and organisations navigating complexity and change.