Accountability comes easily when the conversation centers on employees, supervisors and frontline managers. Expectations get set, performance gets tracked, and someone steps in when results fall short.
But what happens when the person missing the mark owns the company?
That question is at the center of a conversation with Jeff Carmon, an expert coach and consultant with Elite BSC, who spends much of his time helping owners of building service contractor (BSC) companies work through the harder side of leadership, the accountability that has nowhere else to go once someone reaches the top.
Three places accountability lands
Carmon named three groups an owner answers to, though he quickly noted the list could grow. “There’s probably others, but there’s three that I come up with that I think that would probably resonate with most owners,” he said.
The first is customers, the people trusting the company to deliver on its promises. The second involves operating honestly and staying within the law, an obligation Carmon tied to the trust customers place in a business. The third is harder to define but no less real.
“Accountability to the greater good,” Carmon said. “This is your team, and your family, and the community that you serve, and your vendors.” He called it stewardship, the idea that an owner holds something in trust for others. Decisions made at the top ripple outward further than most owners realize, reaching families and communities well beyond the walls of the business.
“That’s a weight that’s certainly worth feeling,” he said, “because it keeps you very humble.”
Building a one-page scorecard
Carmon pointed to a handful of measures that belong on every owner’s personal scorecard, starting with financial health. People who work for the company need to be paid fairly, vendors need to be paid on time, and the business itself needs to stay sustainable. Customer retention and loyalty come next; a natural extension of the accountability owners already owe the people they serve.
A third measure is personal growth. Owners need to keep developing too, whether that means attending conferences, reading books or joining a peer group. The fourth, accountability to the greater good, resists a clean metric. “That one’s really hard to measure,” Carmon said, “but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter.”
None of it should be built alone. Carmon recommended pulling in peers, mentors and advisors who can see blind spots an owner cannot see on their own. “Outside perspective is not a sign of weakness,” he said. “It’s how good leaders stay honest with themselves.”
Creating a culture that speaks up
Getting employees to raise concerns with the person who signs their paycheck is one of the harder problems an owner faces. Carmon reached for a medical comparison to explain the balance required.
Picture a surgeon walking into an operating room, he said. Nobody wants to hear, “I think I know what I’m supposed to be doing here. Can anybody give me some ideas?” What patients want instead is a surgeon who says, “I know what I’m doing here. But at any time during this surgery, if you see anything that impacts this patient’s life, please speak up. It’s imperative that you do that.”
That is the culture an owner needs to build, Carmon said, one in which speaking up is expected rather than dangerous, even as the team continues to see the leader as competent, caring and ultimately responsible for the outcome. The tension between those two things never fully goes away. The best leaders, he said, know how to hold it together.
That standard goes both directions. A leader who grows defensive when the spotlight turns on them creates a culture no one wants to be part of, Carmon said. At the same time, a team’s read on a leader as defensive is not always accurate. Carmon has worked for outstanding leaders he once saw as guarded, only to understand years later, once he carried leadership responsibility himself, how lonely that weight can be.
“The weight of being accountable to everyone—customers, team, family, community—is something I think you can’t fully understand until you’re carrying it,” he said. His answer runs in two directions: owners need to stay open, stay humble and never stop listening, while team members can extend grace to leaders who are often carrying more than anyone realizes.
A gift, not a threat
Carmon closed with a passage from Bret Baier’s book The Case for America, which he read on vacation. Baier argues that happiness comes from pursuing four things daily: faith, family, friends and meaningful work. Within meaningful work, Baier writes, real joy comes from two sources — earning success through merit and hard work, and serving people well. The formula holds, Carmon said, whether someone roofs houses, practices medicine, runs a library or owns a BSC.
“View feedback and accountability from your peers, or your team, or your family not as a threat, but a gift,” Carmon said. “Because when you do, the work becomes less lonely, and it starts to feel like what it was always meant to be—joyful.”
Watch the complete interview with Carmon or listen to the podcast below:
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