In an individual person, an entire organization, or a country's government, accountability is a behavior that includes four pieces:

1. Owning a mistake when we make it.
2. Apologizing for it in a straightforward way.
3. Accurately measuring, and making amends for, the harm this mistake created for other people.
4. Embedding the learnings from the mistake to prevent it in the future.

Since making mistakes is an inevitable part of the human experience, mastering accountability is an imperative. It makes sure that our relationships with others (and ourselves) are not only kept but grown over our mistakes, instead of being corroded and even severed by them.

Accountability is only possible in the absence of shame. When we identify with our mistakes and have trouble drawing the line between what we do and who we are, accountability gets cut off at its knees. Accountability operates from the platform of solid self-worth (I'm the good person, and I made a bad/terrible thing) and is based on guilt — the uncomfortable feeling of misalignment between our values and our factual behavior — which is radically different from shame, being the painful feeling of being flawed and unworthy of connection because of our behavior.

Remarkably, in organizations accountability and shame show up exactly as they do in individual people. In accountability-driven cultures, mistakes are confronted and analyzed in a straightforward way, reparations get made, and learnings get embedded to prevent them. Accountability-driven organizations normalize discomfort and vulnerability in conversations with both their employees and their customers. In shame-driven cultures, mistakes are followed by cover-ups, complicity, and fear riding roughshod over the corporate hierarchy. The quality of products and services degrades, and which makes the organization eventually fail in a competitive market, unless monopoly or other corrupt practices get leveraged.

Accountability is a trust-building behavior, and trust only grows when accountability includes all four pieces. IF the harm is minimized, instead of being fairly measured and acknowledged, shame is likely lurking around the corner. If apologies are given then followed by the same mistake, the authenticity of accountability feels questioned. It all corrodes trust instead of fostering it.

Rationalization, blaming, denial, gaslighting as defense responses, both from an individual and an organization, highly suggest that accountability as a behavior has not been modeled, understood, and valued.

Historically, there's been a culturally ingrained misconception of accountability in the context of reputation. Institutions, corporations, and governments have modeled and implicitly promoted the dangerous idea that owning a mistake is a sign of weakness and therefore a blow at reputation. Research is clear about that: if you don't own a mistake, you become defined by it. In fact, if the culture of any organization protects its reputation and those holding power over it at the cost of the rights, the dignity, and the well-being of people who this system serves (and who serve in that system), you can be certain that shame is all over the place, money trump over ethics, complicity and corruption have massively metastasized, and accountability is all but dead.

This leads me to the last point. Along with boundaries, accountability is the major antidote against abuse. Organizations that score high on accountability, inside and outside, make narcissism and power over unlikely to flourish and metastasize. This, in turn, minimizes the risk of talent drain, secures long-term economic productivity, and creates real, legitimate reputation.