Accountability does not fail because people are irresponsible. It fails because organizations assign accountability to people who lack the power to control outcomes.
When responsibility and power are misaligned, accountability becomes performative. People are held accountable for decisions they did not make, systems they cannot change, and dependencies they cannot control.
This is not a gap in execution. It is a structural mismatch. Organizations build accountability systems that ignore how power actually flows, then act surprised when accountability does not work.
What Power Mismatches Look Like
A power mismatch exists when the person held accountable for an outcome does not control the inputs that determine that outcome.
The product manager is accountable for launch dates but cannot override engineering estimates or deprioritize executive requests.
The site reliability engineer is accountable for uptime but cannot block releases, reject architecture changes, or enforce performance standards.
The customer success manager is accountable for retention but cannot fix product bugs, change pricing, or modify contract terms.
In each case, accountability exists. Authority does not. The person blamed when things fail is not the person who decided what would be built, when it would ship, or how it would operate.
Why Organizations Create Power Mismatches
Power mismatches are not accidents. They are structural features of how organizations distribute work while preserving existing power hierarchies.
Giving someone accountability without power serves several purposes:
It avoids conflict over who decides. If engineering controls the roadmap and product is accountable for outcomes, nobody has to resolve the question of who actually owns prioritization. Both can claim authority in their domain.
It maintains hierarchical control. Executives can retain decision rights while delegating accountability downward. When things fail, the person who executed is blamed, not the person who decided.
It enables blame deflection. When outcomes require coordination across teams, assigning accountability to one team creates a designated failure point. That team cannot compel cooperation, so when coordination fails, they absorb the blame.
Power mismatches let organizations have accountability without granting authority. This is useful if your goal is to identify someone to blame, less useful if your goal is to improve outcomes.
Accountability Without Decision Rights
The most common power mismatch is accountability without decision rights.
You are accountable for velocity, but you do not control hiring, cannot reject scope, and cannot deprioritize technical debt. You are accountable for code quality, but you do not set deadlines, cannot block features, and do not approve architecture.
This creates a predictable failure mode:
Performance suffers because the person accountable cannot make the decisions required to improve it. They escalate. Management does not want to override other teams without consensus. Consensus does not form because teams have conflicting priorities.
The problem persists. The accountable person is blamed for failing to deliver, despite lacking the authority to remove blockers.
Organizations call this a failure of ownership. It is actually a failure to grant the decision rights required for ownership to mean anything.
When Power Sits Upstream of Accountability
Power mismatches are most destructive when power sits upstream of accountability.
The person who controls inputs is not accountable for outputs. The person accountable for outputs cannot control inputs. When things fail, the accountable person is blamed for not managing dependencies they had no power to change.
This happens constantly:
Roadmap accountability. Product is accountable for shipping features that customers want. Engineering controls what gets built and when. Sales controls what gets sold and promised. Product is accountable, but engineering and sales hold veto power over what is possible.
Budget accountability. A team is accountable for staying within budget. Finance controls approval processes and procurement timelines. Leadership controls headcount and tooling decisions. The team is blamed for cost overruns caused by delays they cannot control.
Security accountability. Security teams are accountable for preventing breaches. Engineering controls what gets deployed. Product controls feature timelines. Breaches happen because features shipped without security review. Security is blamed for not preventing something they had no authority to block.
Upstream power creates downstream scapegoats. The person held accountable is the last person in the chain, not the person who made the decisions that determined the outcome.
The Illusion of Influence
Organizations defend power mismatches by claiming that people without authority still have influence.
You may not control the roadmap, but you have a seat at the table. You may not control hiring, but you can make recommendations. You may not control releases, but you can raise concerns.
Influence is not authority. Influence is what you have when someone else has power and might listen to you if you ask politely and build a good case and their incentives align with yours and nothing more urgent comes up.
Holding someone accountable for outcomes they can only influence is holding them accountable for their ability to persuade people who have no obligation to be persuaded.
This works when incentives align naturally. It fails when incentives conflict, which is exactly when accountability matters most.
Why Middle Managers Absorb the Mismatch
Power mismatches concentrate at the middle management layer.
Middle managers are accountable for team performance but do not control hiring timelines, compensation decisions, or strategic direction. They are accountable for execution but do not set priorities, allocate budget, or approve architectural changes.
They have responsibility for outcomes determined by decisions made above them and dependencies managed by teams beside them. When performance suffers, they are blamed for failing to navigate constraints they cannot change.
This is by design. Middle managers exist partly to absorb the accountability for coordination failures that executive leadership is unwilling to resolve.
They cannot force engineering to deprioritize technical work for business features. They cannot compel other teams to hit deadlines. They cannot override decisions made three levels up. But they can be held accountable when any of those things cause problems.
The result is a layer of people with high accountability and low power, blamed for systemic problems they were never given the authority to fix.
Power Mismatches Create Defensive Behavior
When accountability is decoupled from power, people optimize for defense, not performance.
If you are accountable for outcomes you cannot control, your rational strategy is to document everything, escalate early, and build evidence that failures were not your fault.
You stop trying to solve problems because solving problems requires authority you do not have. You focus on proving you followed process, raised concerns, and did everything within your limited power.
Organizations call this CYA behavior and blame individuals for lacking initiative. The actual problem is that initiative without authority is just blame liability with extra steps.
People are not being defensive because they are lazy. They are being defensive because they learned that accountability without power means being blamed for things they could not prevent.
When Accountability Fragments Across Power Centers
Some organizations fragment accountability across multiple people, none of whom have sufficient power to control the outcome.
Three teams are all accountable for customer experience. Engineering controls performance. Product controls features. Operations controls uptime. Each can degrade experience. None can unilaterally improve it.
This creates diffuse accountability, where everyone is responsible and nobody is in control.
When experience degrades, all three teams are blamed. All three claim they did their part. All three are correct. The problem was not individual failure. It was structural fragmentation.
Fragmented accountability is worse than no accountability. It creates the appearance of responsibility while ensuring that no single person has the power to fix systemic issues.
The Coordination Trap
Power mismatches force coordination. Coordination becomes a substitute for authority.
If you cannot decide unilaterally, you coordinate. You schedule meetings. You build consensus. You escalate to leadership for tie-breaking. All of this takes time.
The result is decision latency. Problems that could be solved in hours with clear authority take weeks because the accountable person has to negotiate with four other teams.
Organizations interpret this latency as a need for “better collaboration.” The actual problem is that collaboration is what happens when power and accountability are misaligned. If the accountable person had authority, they would not need to collaborate. They would decide.
Collaboration is not a solution to power mismatches. It is a symptom.
Why Executives Avoid Fixing Mismatches
Fixing power mismatches requires consolidating authority. This creates political cost.
If you give product managers real control over roadmaps, engineering loses autonomy. If you give SREs authority to block releases, product loses velocity. If you give team leads hiring authority, HR loses oversight.
Every consolidation of authority means some team loses power. Those teams resist. Leadership avoids the fight by maintaining the status quo: distributed power, concentrated accountability.
This is easier than resolving structural conflicts. It also ensures that accountability remains performative, because nobody has enough power to actually control outcomes.
The Performance Cost of Misalignment
Power mismatches do not just fail to improve accountability. They actively degrade performance.
When accountable people lack power, decisions get escalated. Escalation creates bottlenecks. Bottlenecks create delays. Delays compound into systemic underperformance.
When power is distributed across people who are not accountable, decisions are made based on local incentives rather than system-wide outcomes. Engineering optimizes for technical elegance. Product optimizes for feature velocity. Operations optimizes for stability. Nobody optimizes for the customer because nobody has both the accountability and the power to do so.
The result is a system where everyone is doing their job and the system still fails. This is not a people problem. It is a structure problem.
Accountability as Blame Allocation
In organizations with power mismatches, accountability stops being a tool for improvement and becomes a tool for blame allocation.
The question is not “who has the power to fix this?” The question is “who can we hold accountable when it breaks?”
This leads to accountability assignment that ignores operational reality. People are made accountable because they are junior, because they are in a visible role, or because their team has low political capital. Not because they control the outcome.
When failures happen, the accountability assignment determines who gets blamed. The fact that they lacked the authority to prevent the failure is inconvenient but irrelevant.
Accountability becomes a pre-assigned scapegoat system. It does not improve outcomes. It determines who takes the fall when outcomes are bad.
What Happens When Nobody Acknowledges the Mismatch
The worst case is not that power mismatches exist. It is that organizations refuse to acknowledge them.
Leadership insists that accountability and authority are aligned. People who point out mismatches are told they lack ownership or are not being proactive enough. The structural problem is reframed as an individual failure.
This ensures that power mismatches never get fixed, because the organization has committed to pretending they do not exist.
People stop raising the issue. They accept that accountability means blame liability, authority belongs to someone else, and their job is to execute within constraints they cannot change.
Performance degrades. Leadership blames individuals for lack of accountability. The cycle continues.
Why This Persists
Organizations tolerate power mismatches because fixing them requires confronting uncomfortable truths about who actually controls outcomes.
Real accountability requires giving people authority. Authority is finite. Giving it to one person means taking it from another. That creates conflict, political cost, and organizational disruption.
Fake accountability costs nothing. It avoids conflict, preserves existing hierarchies, and provides someone to blame when things fail.
So organizations keep building accountability systems that ignore power, wondering why accountability never improves.