What clients want more than anything is to know that we're more interested in helping them than we are in maintaining our revenue source. - Patrick Lencioni

Though it always amazed her, Kathryn knew from past experience that the departure of even the most difficult employees provoked some degree of mourning and self-doubt among their peers.

Ironically, for peer-to-peer accountability to become a part of a team's culture, it has to be modeled by the leader. That's right. Even though I said earlier that the best kind of accountability is peer-to-peer, the key to making it stick is the willingness of the team leader to do something I call "enter the danger" whenever someone needs to be called on their behavior or performance. That means being willing to step right into the middle of a difficult issue and remind individual team members of their responsibility, both in terms of behavior and results. But most leaders I know have a far easier time holding people accountable for their results than they do for behavioral issues. This is a problem because behavioral problems almost always precede results. That means team members have to be willing to call each other on behavioral issues, as uncomfortable as that might be, and if they see their leader balk at doing this, then they aren't going to do it themselves.

As important as it is for all members of a leadership team to commit to being vulnerable, that is not going to happen if the leader of the team, whether that person is the CEO, department head, pastor, or school principal, does not go first. If the team leader is reluctant to acknowledge his or her mistakes or fails to admit to a weakness that is evident to everyone else, there is little hope that other members of the team are going to take that step themselves. In fact, it probably wouldn't be advisable for them to do so because there is a good chance that their vulnerability would be neither encouraged nor rewarded.