Accountability Quotes for the Workplace: 12 Leaders Who Owned the Outcome, in Their Exact Words

On June 5, 1944, the day before the Normandy landings, Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote a four-sentence press statement in case the invasion failed. Under the strain of that day he dated it "July 5". The note was never needed, and the Eisenhower Library still has it. Its last sentence is one of the clearest acts of accountability on record: the whole failure, assigned to one name, before anyone could ask.

This page collects 12 accountability quotes for the workplace, each checked against the speech, letter, book or testimony it comes from. Before the quotes there is a short table that separates accountability from responsibility and from blame, because most quote lists mix up the three. After them come a four-part message you can use when you're the one who dropped something, and six popular lines with the wrong name attached.

Accountability, responsibility, blame: what each one sounds like

The words get used as if they meant the same thing. At work they don't, and the difference decides which quote fits your situation.

Brené Brown and Patrick Lencioni sit in a fourth group: what holding other people accountable looks like when you mean it.

Owning a failure out loud

These three were written or spoken by people with every reason to spread the blame around. None of them did.

Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.

— Dwight D. Eisenhower, "In case of failure" note, written June 5, 1944 (misdated July 5)

Look at the order. First the fact, with no softening. Then the decision and what it rested on. Then praise for everyone who carried it out, and only then the blame, all of it, in the first person. The National Archives catalogues the note as identifier 186470 and shows the handwritten original on DocsTeach. The last sentence is the one to quote. The full note works best as a model for writing your own, which is what the practical section below does.

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There's an old saying that victory has 100 fathers and defeat is an orphan.

— John F. Kennedy, news conference, April 21, 1961

Kennedy said this two days after the Bay of Pigs invasion collapsed, when reporters pressed him on what had gone wrong. He declined to spread the blame to the CIA or the military planners, and in the same answer he added that keeping quiet on the details was "not to conceal responsibility because I'm the responsible officer of the Government." He called the line an old saying, and an earlier form of it appears in Count Ciano's wartime diary. The "thousand fathers" version is a later variation. The transcript is in the American Presidency Project. Use it when a project has failed and the room is getting quiet about whose project it was.

I now wish to make the personal acknowledgment that you were right, and I was wrong.

— Abraham Lincoln, letter to Ulysses S. Grant, July 13, 1863

After Vicksburg fell, Lincoln wrote to the general he had doubted. He explained that he had wanted Grant to march south and join Banks rather than turn north, and that he had feared it was a mistake. Then came this sentence, from a president to a subordinate, with no "but" after it. The letter is printed in Basler's Collected Works and on Abraham Lincoln Online. It is the line to remember when someone on your team called it right and you didn't.

Where the buck stops: the part of the job you can't hand off

Responsibility can be delegated; accountability for the outcome can't. These three lines draw the line between the two.

The President--whoever he is--has to decide. He can't pass the buck to anybody. No one else can do the deciding for him. That's his job.

— Harry S. Truman, farewell address to the American people, January 15, 1953

Truman's desk sign, "The Buck Stops Here!", was made at the federal reformatory in El Reno, Oklahoma. His friend Fred Canfil, a U.S. marshal, had seen one like it there and asked for a copy, and it was mailed to the White House on October 2, 1945. The back reads "I'm From Missouri." The sign is famous, but the farewell address is where Truman explained it, in plain words, as he was leaving office. The speech is on the American Presidency Project. Swap "the President" for "the manager" and it describes every team lead who has to make the final call.

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Responsibility is a unique concept; it may only reside and inhere in a single individual. You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you.

— Hyman G. Rickover, congressional testimony, 1961, as quoted in Theodore Rockwell, The Rickover Effect (1992)

Rickover built the U.S. Navy's nuclear-propulsion program and ran it for three decades. The passage goes on: "You may disclaim it, but you cannot divest yourself of it." It is often said to come from his 1982 Columbia University speech "Doing a Job", but it isn't in that text. The closest line there is "Unless the individual truly responsible can be identified when something goes wrong, no one has really been responsible." The American Nuclear Society dates the longer passage to his 1961 testimony; we cite it through Rockwell, who worked with him. It is the best quote on this page for a new manager who thinks delegating a task means handing off the outcome.

The price of greatness is responsibility.

— Winston Churchill, address at Harvard University, September 6, 1943

Churchill was accepting an honorary degree and telling Americans they could no longer stay out of world affairs. His point was that a powerful country cannot choose to be unaccountable for what happens around it. The International Churchill Society has the speech. At work it suits a promotion note or a team that has just grown: more reach, more to answer for. It is six words long, which makes it one of the few accountability lines that fits on a slide.

Before you blame the person, check the system

Accountability goes wrong when it turns into a search for whoever touched the problem last. These three lines are the correction.

I should estimate that in my experience most troubles and most possibilities for improvement add up to proportions something like this: 94% belong to the system (responsibility of management) 6% special.

— W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis (MIT, 1986), p. 315

Deming spent decades teaching Japanese and then American manufacturers that most defects come from the process people work inside, not from the people. His number is an estimate from experience, and he presents it that way. It is not a study, so don't quote it as one. Use it when a review is heading toward one person's name: before deciding who failed, ask what in the setup made the failure easy. In Deming's view, that part is management's to own.

You can stumble and fall, make errors and mistakes, but you are not a failure until you start blaming others, including fate, for your results.

— John Wooden, Wooden on Leadership, with Steve Jamison (McGraw-Hill, 2005)

The UCLA basketball coach credited the idea to his father, Joshua Wooden. The version on most quote sites ("you aren't a failure until you start blaming others for those mistakes") is a shortened paraphrase; the book wording is above, and the Wooden estate's own site uses a short form close to it. It suits a one-to-one after a setback, because it treats the mistake as normal and the blaming as the actual problem.

Mistakes aren't a necessary evil. They aren't evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new.

— Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc., with Amy Wallace (Random House, 2014)

Catmull co-founded Pixar and ran it for decades. The book argues that a studio that punishes mistakes ends up making safe, dull films. The sentence continues: "(and, as such, should be seen as valuable; without them, we'd have no originality)". Pair it with the accountability lines above: a team will own its mistakes much more readily when owning one doesn't end a career. It works for kicking off a pilot project or opening a post-mortem.

Holding a team to its word

Owning your own failures is half of it. The other half is expecting the same from others, without turning every miss into a trial.

On any team, in any organization, all responsibility for success and failure rests with the leader. The leader must own everything in his or her world. There is no one else to blame.

— Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, Extreme Ownership (St. Martin's Press, 2015), chapter 1

Willink and Babin were Navy SEAL officers in Ramadi, Iraq, in 2006, and each chapter of their book pairs a combat lesson with a business one. The popular form "Leaders must own everything in their world" is a paraphrase; the book's sentence is above. Chapter 2 is titled "No Bad Teams, Only Bad Leaders", and in it they make the point that matters most for holding others accountable: a standard means only as much as the leader is willing to enforce it. Use the quote with a team of supervisors, not with the people they supervise. It is a demand on leaders, not on the team.

More than any policy or system, there is nothing like the fear of letting down respected teammates that motivates people to improve their performance.

— Patrick Lencioni, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Jossey-Bass, 2002)

"Avoidance of accountability" is the fourth dysfunction in Lencioni's model, and his fix is peer accountability. Teammates call each other on missed commitments, so the manager isn't the only enforcer. The line is useful for a team charter or an offsite. It explains why "we hold each other to it" is a stronger rule than "the manager will check".

Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.

— Brené Brown, Dare to Lead (Random House, 2018)

Brown says she first heard the phrase at a twelve-step meeting, so it is fair to say she made it popular rather than coined it. In Dare to Lead she uses it against a habit most managers know: hinting at a problem instead of naming it, then holding someone accountable for an expectation they were never told. Say it to yourself before a hard conversation, not to the person you're having it with.

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When you are the one who dropped it: a four-part owning message

Most accountability quotes are about owning a failure, and the people who said them all did roughly the same four things. You can copy the structure for an email or a stand-up update. Keep it short; the longer the message, the more it sounds like a defence.

1. Say what happened, in plain words. No passive voice ("mistakes were made"), no softeners ("a slight delay"). One sentence.
2. Put your name on your part. Not on everyone else's. Eisenhower's note praises the troops, the air force and the navy, then takes the blame himself; that is the pattern.
3. Say what you are doing about it. A date, a step, a person who will hear from you.
4. Stop. Don't add a quote, a lesson or a "but". Lincoln's line to Grant above works because it is one sentence long and has nothing after it.

Example, for a missed deadline: "The client report went out two days late because I didn't flag that the data pull was slipping. That's on me, not on the analysts, who sent it to me on time. The revised schedule is attached, and I'll check in with you on Thursday before it goes out."

Example, for a decision that went wrong: "I picked the cheaper vendor over the team's recommendation, and the outage this week is the result. You were right and I was wrong. We're moving back to the original vendor this month, and the person who flagged the risk first will run the switch."

Six accountability lines with the wrong name on them

These appear on nearly every accountability list, and none of them is attributed correctly. More corrections like these are on our page of leadership quotes leaders never said.

• "You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today." Credited to Abraham Lincoln, but it isn't in his Collected Works. Lincoln researchers trace it to a 1943 newspaper list of sayings, with the Lincoln credit spreading in the 1960s. Author unknown.
• "It is not only what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable." Credited to Molière. It has not been found in his plays; the earliest English printing is Maturin Ballou's Treasury of Thought (1871), with no source. Write "attributed to Molière".
• "Ninety-nine percent of the failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses." Credited to George Washington Carver. No letter, speech or dated early printing has turned up. Mark it "attributed".
• "He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else." Credited to Benjamin Franklin, but it isn't in Poor Richard. The earliest versions are from 1809, nineteen years after he died: an anecdote book and a London opera (Quote Investigator).
• "Accountability breeds response-ability." Credited to Stephen R. Covey. We could not find the phrase in his books. If you use it, write "attributed to Covey".
• "Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility." Credited to Peter Drucker, but rewritten. His wording in Managing for the Future (1992) is "rank does not confer privileges; it entails responsibilities." Use that. Our Peter Drucker quotes page has other lines of his checked against the books.

Two questions people ask about accountability quotes

What's a good short quote about accountability?

For six words, Churchill's "The price of greatness is responsibility" (Harvard, 1943). For one sentence about owning a mistake, Eisenhower's "If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone" (1944) or Lincoln's "you were right, and I was wrong" (1863). All three have a dated primary source, so nobody can tell you that you got them wrong.

How do you show accountability at work without a quote?

Say what happened, put your name on your part, say what you're doing about it, and stop. That is the four-part message above, and it's the same order Eisenhower used. A quote can open the conversation, but the owning message is what people will remember.

Where to go from here

If you are opening a weekly meeting with one of these, our guide to quotes for team meetings covers how to do it in under a minute. For the commanders behind several of the lines above, see military leadership quotes. And when you pick a line from this page, keep the name and date with it. It is a small act of accountability in itself.