Accountability: commitments, follow-through and follow-up
Turn vague agreements into clear commitments with one owner, a definition of done and a date; track them visibly; follow up missed commitments early, privately and with curiosity; separate system problems from individual ones; know when a pattern becomes a performance matter for HR; and model accountability yourself.
- Level
- Intermediate
- Length
- About 45 minutes
- Contents
- 3 lessons · 1 video · final exam
- Status
- Published · updated 1 Oct 2026
Skills you'll practise
- Rewrite a vague action as a commitment with one owner, a clear definition of done and a due date
- Read an action tracker to find overdue, ownerless and at-risk items and calculate on-time completion
- Run a follow-up conversation on a missed commitment that looks for causes before conclusions
- Distinguish a system or capacity problem from an individual pattern, and escalate a pattern to HR's process appropriately
- Model accountability by owning your own misses openly
Course outline
- 1.Accountability: commitments, follow-through and follow-upVideo · 3 min
- 2.Clear commitmentsLesson · 14 min
- 3.Tracking and following upLesson · 16 min
- 4.Patterns, escalation and modelling it yourselfLesson · 15 min
- 5.Accountability: commitments, follow-through and follow-up: knowledge checkKnowledge check · 15 questions
- 6.Final exam9 questions · passing it completes the course, so people who already know the material can test out
Sources it draws on
The lessons and questions are written from these references, so learners can go back to the original.
- General people-leadership practice for team leads and managers
- Google SRE book, chapter 15: Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure
See it with your own jobs and topics
Tell us about your team and we'll walk you through setup, from choosing jobs to your first skills check.