Why “they should know better” isn’t a leadership strategy
There are few things more frustrating as a leader than dealing with something that feels like it should be common sense.
Why didn’t you say something six weeks ago? Why wait until the last minute? Why send a text instead of having the conversation when you had the chance, standing right there? Can’t you see how this affects everyone else?
I’ve thought some version of all four of those recently. And if I’m being honest, “they should know better” is a phrase I’ve reached for more times in my leadership career than I’d like to admit.
But I’ve started to notice the problem with it. It isn’t a strategy. It’s a description of my frustration. And what happens when they don’t know better? That’s where leadership actually starts.
Sometimes accountability isn’t about getting someone to admit they did something wrong. It’s helping them see an impact they genuinely don’t see. Sometimes it’s teaching a new leader how to hold someone accountable without just enforcing a rule. And sometimes it’s recognizing that what feels like common sense to an experienced leader is really judgment we built through years of getting it wrong first.
I got a reminder of all three recently, when one fairly simple request turned into a leadership lesson at three different levels.
When a Simple Request Becomes an Accountability Problem
We were prepping for an improv show at a new location at the last minute due to scheduling issues at our regular venue. There were already more moving parts than usual: a new venue, some new processes, and two newer leaders responsible for managing the cast and making the whole thing run. I hadn’t fully prepared them for how much uncertainty a new location adds. That’s on me, and I knew it even as this was unfolding.
Then, six days before the show, one of the team members asked to change his role.
He’d been assigned (by me) an important supporting role six weeks earlier. Now he wanted to be in a different part of the show, because his family was coming and he wanted them to see him perform that way. Understandable reason. Terrible timing.
And the way he made the request made it worse. He’d just been at rehearsal with both directors, in the room, in person. Instead of saying anything then, he waited until everyone had left and sent a text message.
One of the new directors came to me for coaching. What looked like a scheduling problem turned into three separate coaching conversations.
Why Timing Is Part of Accountability
When I finally talked with him, I asked the obvious question: “Why didn’t you bring this up six weeks ago, when the roles were being assigned?”
His answer told me everything. He knew that if he got the “seat on the bus” he wanted, someone else would probably have to give it up. So he waited.
Which is the irony. He avoided saying something because he knew it would affect someone else, and by waiting, he created a situation that ended up affecting a lot more people. Six weeks out, there were options. Six days out, there were dependencies. The leaders had built plans around the assignments. Other performers were counting on them. And because we were in a new location, the two leaders were already managing more uncertainty than usual.
The request itself hadn’t really changed. The cost of it had. Timing is part of accountability, even though we don’t talk about it that way very often.
“But I Told You”: When Communication Breaks Down
There was one more wrinkle. He told me that he had told the leaders that he’d already mentioned wanting this role. And he repeated it to me once I got involved with this situation. I genuinely had no memory of it. When I pressed, it turned out he’d said it verbally, in passing. He also told the directors that someone had suggested he bring it up to me that night, and when I asked who, he said he couldn’t tell me. A text later filled in the gap: it was his significant other and some family members.
Here’s where “common sense” gets slippery again. I have a lot of people telling me a lot of things, before rehearsal, after meetings, walking through a room, while I’m juggling ten other things. If you need me to act on something, I need it in a form I can actually track. Send the email. Send the message. Put it somewhere it doesn’t depend on my memory. Communication isn’t finished just because words left your mouth, and if you think someone forgot something important to you, the answer is to bring it up again, not to let it sit until the cost of solving it has multiplied.
That might sound like common sense too. Apparently it isn’t.
So I had a choice. I could think, he should know better. Or I could coach what he didn’t yet see.
What Does Accountability Actually Mean?
Workplace accountability is usually described as taking ownership of your responsibilities, decisions, and results. But I think leadership requires a broader definition. Accountability isn’t only owning what you did. It’s understanding how what you do affects everyone else.
That means timing is accountability. Communication is accountability. Speaking up is accountability. Considering the downstream impact of your request is accountability. And when you’re leading others, helping people develop that awareness becomes part of your accountability too.
Accountability Level One: Teaching Employees to See Their Impact
The easiest thing would have been to just explain why his request couldn’t be accommodated. That solves the immediate problem, but it doesn’t develop the person or the other leaders.
His real coaching opportunity was learning to see past his own view of the situation. From where he stood, it was simple: my family is coming, this matters to me, I’d like to perform this role. Fair enough. But accountability asks a second question: what has to happen to everyone else for me to get what I want? If we moved him, someone else likely has to give something up. The directors adjust their plans. Other people reasonably start asking why their preferences didn’t get the same consideration. Once we make one exception, we have to be willing to make it for everyone.
That’s the shift from “how does this affect me” to “how does this affect us.” Not about owning a mistake, but about understanding your ripple effect, speaking up early, and sometimes accepting a “no” answer.
Accountability Level Two: Teaching New Leaders to Use Judgment
Then there were my two newer directors, and their growth edge was different.
When you’re new to leadership, it’s easy to believe your job is to make the unhappy person happy again. Someone’s upset, and your brain immediately starts looking for the compromise. But leadership isn’t the art of eliminating everyone’s disappointment. It’s the responsibility of deciding for the whole system, and that takes judgment you build over time.
Instead of handing them an answer, the better move was helping them build better questions. What changed to bring this up now? Who’s affected either way? What precedent are we setting, and are we willing to hold that same line for the next three people who ask? One question in particular tends to shift the whole conversation: if you were responsible for the whole team instead of just your own role, what would you do?
This is close to what Hersey and Blanchard called situational leadership back in the 1970s: the idea that good leaders don’t have one fixed style, they match it to how ready the person in front of them actually is. A newer leader sometimes needs to be told. Sometimes they need to be asked. My job with these two wasn’t to hand them the answer I already had. It was to help them build the judgment to find their own.
That’s not just holding someone accountable. It’s developing accountability, and their own judgment, at the same time.
Accountability Level Three: When “Common Sense” Is Actually Experience
Then I realized I needed the coaching too.
I already knew what I thought the right call was. I could see the dependencies, the precedent, the fairness problem, the extra work an exception would create, the conversation that should have happened six weeks earlier. When you’ve led long enough, it’s easy to stand there thinking, how do you not see this?
But that’s exactly where “common sense” gets leaders into trouble. Economists actually have a name for this: the curse of knowledge, first described by researchers Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein, and Martin Weber in 1989. Once you know something, it’s genuinely hard to reconstruct what it was like not to know it, so you underestimate how much explaining another person actually needs. What feels obvious to us usually feels that way because we’ve lived through some version of it a dozen times, made the bad call ourselves once, and learned. That’s not common sense. That’s experience wearing a disguise. And if someone hasn’t built that experience yet, telling them they should know better doesn’t help them build it.
Coaching does. My job isn’t to raise leaders who make the exact decisions I’d make. It’s to raise leaders who know what to weigh before they make their own.
Three Levels of Accountability Coaching
Employees: Coach perspective.
Help them see how their choices affect other people.New leaders: Coach judgment.
Help them consider the whole system, not just the problem in front of them.Experienced leaders: Coach thinking.
Make the reasoning behind your decisions visible so others can learn how to think through similar situations themselves.
How Leaders Build a Culture of Accountability
We tend to define accountability as doing what you said you’d do, and owning it when you don’t. I think it’s bigger than that. It’s recognizing that we all operate inside a system, and our timing, our communication, our avoidance, our requests, all of it lands on other people whether we mean it to or not.
The thing we want isn’t always unreasonable. It becomes a problem when we expect everyone else to absorb the cost of us getting it.
So maybe “they should know better” isn’t wrong, exactly. Maybe they should. But they don’t, yet. And that leaves us with a choice: get frustrated, enforce the rule, fix it ourselves and move on … or coach the thinking that’s actually missing.
Accountability isn’t just something we demand from people. It’s something we build in them, one conversation at a time.
