Hannah Wilson
Last week, I joined a Trust leadership team on their away day as they reflected on how far they had come, both as a Trust and as a team, while preparing for the next stage of their growth.
I began the day as a participant, sitting in on the CEO’s opening session as she explored the journey from psychological safety towards relational safety. For the second part of the day, we swapped roles. She became a participant and I facilitated the team, building on the foundations she had established.
Our focus was collective accountability.
As Trusts grow and evolve, so too must the relationships, behaviours and ways of working within their leadership teams. What worked when an organisation was smaller may not be sufficient for its next stage of development.
Growth requires leaders to think beyond their individual roles, schools and priorities, and to consider what it genuinely means to lead collectively.
Using Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle as a starting point, we explored three questions:
- Why do we need increased accountability across the Trust?
- How do we develop a culture of high challenge and low threat to build collective accountability?
- What does a high-performing Trust leadership team actually look like?
These questions led us into a deeper conversation about trust, relationships, challenge and our shared responsibility for results.
From psychological safety to relational safety
Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety provides an important foundation for understanding effective teams. Psychological safety describes a shared belief that it is safe to take interpersonal risks, including asking questions, raising concerns, acknowledging mistakes and offering ideas without fear of negative consequences. Importantly, psychological safety is not about being comfortable all of the time, nor is it about avoiding disagreement.
This distinction matters.
Sometimes psychological safety can be misunderstood as creating a culture in which everybody feels comfortable, everybody agrees and difficult conversations are avoided.
But safety and comfort are not the same thing.
In high-performing teams, safety creates the conditions in which discomfort can be navigated constructively. It enables people to disagree, challenge, question, admit mistakes and hold one another accountable without fearing that doing so will damage their relationships or their standing within the team.
This is where I think we need to move from thinking solely about psychological safety towards considering relational safety.
- Do I trust the relationship enough to disagree with you?
- Can I challenge your thinking without damaging our connection?
- Can I tell you that something is not working?
- Can I receive difficult feedback without interpreting it as a personal attack?
- Can we experience disagreement and still know that we belong?
Explicit contracting can help teams to establish these expectations. Rather than assuming everybody understands how challenge, disagreement and feedback will work, teams can consciously agree how they want to work together.
Relational safety does not remove challenge. It makes constructive challenge possible.
Building consciousness, confidence and competence
As we explored collective accountability, I invited the leaders to consider three dimensions of their leadership development:
- Consciousness: Are we sufficiently aware of how our behaviours create, strengthen or undermine trust and psychological safety?
- Confidence: Are we willing to hold ourselves and others accountable when expectations are not being met?
- Competence: Do we have the skills and language to navigate courageous conversations, increase challenge and resolve conflict constructively?
We need all three.
Awareness without action does not change culture. Confidence without competence can result in challenge being delivered poorly. Competence without the confidence to use it means the conversations that need to happen remain unspoken.
Collective accountability therefore requires more than an organisational structure, performance framework or set of expectations. It requires leaders who are conscious of their impact, confident enough to address what needs addressing and competent enough to do so relationally.
From dysfunction to high performance
Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team gave us another lens through which to explore this.
His model identifies five interconnected dysfunctions: an absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability and inattention to results.
Crucially, the model is sequential. Without trust, constructive conflict becomes difficult. Without productive conflict, commitment can become superficial. Without genuine commitment, accountability becomes harder. And without accountability, collective results suffer.
We reframed these dysfunctions as five commitments of a high-performing team:
- Trust: We feel psychologically safe and have a strong sense of belonging.
- Constructive conflict: We know we can speak up, share our views and challenge the status quo.
- Commitment: We understand our role and how we contribute to the bigger picture.
- Accountability: We hold ourselves and others accountable for fulfilling our responsibilities.
- Results: We are high-performing and have collective impact.
The important word here is collective.
Because there is a difference between having a group of successful leaders and having a successful leadership team.
Responsibility is not the same as accountability
One of our reflections centred on the distinction between responsibility and accountability.
Responsibility asks: What am I expected to do?
Accountability goes further: Did I do it? What was the impact? What happens if I do not? Who else is affected by my actions or inaction?
The space between expectation and execution is where an accountability gap can emerge:
- We may have agreed the action.
- We may know who owns it.
- We may even have established the deadline.
But what happens when it does not happen?
- Do we notice?
- Do we ask?
- Do we challenge?
- Do we follow through?
- Or do we quietly adjust around it?
Accountability is not simply about allocating responsibilities. It is about creating a culture in which our commitments to one another matter.
Relational capital is necessary, but it is not enough
Strong relationships matter enormously.
Trust enables people to share knowledge and admit mistakes. Communication allows teams to surface issues and resolve them more quickly. Support encourages colleagues to step in and offer additional capacity when pressure rises.
This relational capital creates important foundations for teamwork. But strong relationships alone do not create high performance.
High-performing teams combine strong relationships with clear expectations, shared goals, appropriate expertise, effective communication and continuous accountability.
In fact, there can sometimes be a tension here. When relationships are strong, leaders may become reluctant to challenge one another because they do not want to jeopardise those relationships. We tell ourselves that we are being kind. We give another chance. We compensate for a missed deadline. We quietly pick something up ourselves.
Over time, however, avoiding challenge can undermine the very trust we are trying to protect. Missed commitments affect other people. Inconsistent follow-through creates additional work. Resentment can grow. Expectations become blurred. What initially felt relational can ultimately become corrosive.
Strong relationships should not protect us from accountability. They should enable us to practise accountability well.
Recognising our accountability traps
We identified some common traps:
- avoiding difficult conversations;
- allowing inconsistent follow-through;
- prioritising the needs of an individual school over collective Trust goals;
- assuming everybody interprets expectations in the same way.
These behaviours can be particularly difficult to notice because they may not initially feel problematic:
- Avoiding a difficult conversation can feel compassionate.
- Giving somebody more time can feel supportive.
- Prioritising our own school can feel responsible.
- Assuming shared understanding can feel efficient.
- But the cumulative impact can be significant.
This raises an important question for Trust leadership teams: How do we move from individual responsibility to collective accountability?
From ‘my’ to ‘our’.
Part of this shift is structural. But much of it is cultural. And culture is revealed through language.
We explored what might happen if we consciously changed some of the language we use:
- My school → Our Trust
- My priorities → Our priorities
- My deadlines → Our commitments
- My impact → Our results
This is not about diminishing the identity, autonomy or context of individual schools. Nor does collective leadership mean that every school needs exactly the same thing at exactly the same time. It means recognising our interdependence.
It means adopting the mindset: When one school succeeds, we all succeed.
And equally: When one school struggles, we all have a responsibility.
The question shifts from “Is that my responsibility?” towards “What is my contribution to our collective success?”
That is a significant cultural shift.
Accountability requires courageous conversations
Of course, collective accountability is easy to describe and much harder to practise. Because ultimately, accountability happens through conversations.
Susan Scott’s Fierce Conversations invites us to consider the relationship between the quality of our conversations and the quality of our relationships. The conversations we avoid do not simply disappear. The issue remains, often becoming harder to address as time passes.
This is where courageous conversations become a leadership competence rather than an optional interpersonal skill.
Kim Scott’s Radical Candor framework offers another useful lens. Scott describes Radical Candor as combining two behaviours: caring personally and challenging directly.
When leaders care but fail to challenge, Scott describes this as “ruinous empathy”. When they challenge without demonstrating care, it becomes “obnoxious aggression”.
When neither is present, she describes “manipulative insincerity”. Radical Candor exists when care and challenge are both present.
For leadership teams, this offers an important provocation.
What if holding somebody accountable is not evidence that the relationship is weak?
What if our willingness to challenge respectfully is evidence that the relationship is strong enough to hold it?
Imagine that a colleague repeatedly misses key deadlines. Their actions are now affecting workflow, increasing pressure on colleagues and beginning to erode trust:
- Ruinous empathy might lead us to keep making allowances.
- Obnoxious aggression might result in public criticism, blame or frustration.
- Manipulative insincerity might mean saying nothing to them while discussing the problem with everybody else.
- Radical Candor requires something different: naming the issue clearly, explaining its impact, listening to understand what is happening and agreeing what needs to change.
Care and challenge are not competing leadership behaviours. We need both.
High challenge, low threat
This brings us back to the culture we create:
- High-performing teams do not eliminate challenge. They create the relational conditions in which challenge can happen productively.
- High challenge without relational safety can create defensiveness, fear and withdrawal.
- High relational safety without sufficient challenge can create comfort, avoidance and stagnation.
The goal is high challenge and low threat. People need to know that they can be questioned without being diminished, corrected without being humiliated and held accountable without their belonging being withdrawn.
This is where belonging and accountability intersect:
- Belonging cannot mean lowering expectations.
- Psychological safety cannot mean avoiding difficult conversations.
- Care cannot mean allowing behaviours that negatively affect everybody else.
In healthy cultures, relationships are strong enough to withstand challenge.
From a group of leaders to a leadership team
Towards the end of the session, we returned to the question of what collective accountability might look and feel like across the Trust.
We considered:
- How do we currently work together?
- How do we want to evolve how we work together moving forwards?
- Where have we experienced healthy accountability, and what did it look and feel like?
- Where do we currently avoid challenge?
- What behaviours demonstrate that we are acting as one Trust rather than as individual schools?
- What does accountability feel like when relationships are strong?
These are not questions that can be answered once on an away day and then filed away. They require ongoing attention because collective leadership is a practice.
It is demonstrated in meetings, conversations, decisions, deadlines and moments of disagreement. It is visible in whether we challenge or remain silent. It is revealed in whether we protect our own priorities or consider the collective. It is tested when things do not go according to plan.
We finished by inviting each leader to identify:
- one behaviour they would stop;
- one behaviour they would start;
- one contribution they would make to strengthen Trust-wide collaboration.
Because ultimately, culture changes through behaviour.
And perhaps the most powerful question for any Trust leadership team is this:
- If an observer watched your team for two days, would they describe you as a group of excellent school leaders, or as an excellent Trust leadership team?
The distinction matters. As Trusts grow, collective accountability cannot be an aspiration. It needs to become part of how leaders think, speak, behave and work together:
- From my to our.
- From responsibility to accountability.
- From relational safety to courageous challenge.
- From individual impact to collective results.
- That is how we shape intention into impact.
References and resources
Amy Edmondson, The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth
Patrick Lencioni, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
Kim Scott, Radical Candor
Susan Scott, Fierce Conversations
Simon Sinek, Start With Why
Mary Myatt, High Challenge, Low Threat
Center for Creative Leadership, resources on psychological safety and accountability
The Belonging Effect, Courageous Conversations Toolkit