Accountability Isn’t a People Problem: Why Growing Businesses Get Stuck Between Teams

Ask most founders where execution breaks down and they’ll point to people.

“Someone dropped the ball.”
“They didn’t follow through.”
“We need better managers.”

Often, that’s not the real issue.

In scaling businesses, execution problems rarely live inside teams.
They live between them.

Where work really breaks

As businesses grow, work flows across functions:

  • sales hands over to delivery

  • delivery hands over to finance

  • finance hands over to operations

If ownership isn’t clear end-to-end, gaps appear.

No one is deliberately avoiding responsibility.
It just isn’t clearly defined.

That’s when you hear:

“I thought someone else owned that.”

Why accountability gets fuzzy with growth

Early on, roles are flexible.
Everyone chips in.
That flexibility is a strength — until it isn’t.

As complexity increases:

  • functional roles overlap

  • processes span departments

  • accountability becomes assumed rather than agreed

The result is friction, delays, and repeated issues that never quite get fixed.

Process accountability changes the conversation

One of the most effective ways to restore control is to step back and ask:

  • what are the handful of core processes that make this business work?

  • who owns each one, end to end?

  • how do we know it’s working?

When processes have a single owner and clear expectations, problems stop bouncing around.

Execution improves without adding layers of management.

Accountability isn’t about control

This isn’t about blame.
It’s about clarity.

Clear accountability:

  • reduces tension

  • speeds up decisions

  • gives people confidence about what they own

Most leadership teams feel relief when this becomes explicit.

Bringing it all together

Process accountability, functional accountability, priorities, values, and numbers all connect.
When they’re aligned, businesses run smoothly.
When they’re not, growth feels chaotic.

This is why our invite-only working session, One Page Strategic Plan – Creating Clarity, walks through these elements together — not as theory, but as applied thinking for real businesses.

The session is led by Kevin Riley, who previously scaled his own international business to over £20m and now works with founders and leadership teams navigating this exact stage of growth.

If you’ve been invited and want to understand whether the day would be useful, you can find the full overview here.