Summary: New research has found that accountability and effective judgement are inherently human skills that AI can’t replicate. Organisations need to step up and nurture these skills, ensuring a culture that allows the ability to take ownership and personal risk.
The changing landscape of modern workplaces brings new challenges for everyone. We are still getting to grips with hybrid and flexible working and the urgency to leverage the power of AI is increasing. Meanwhile, policy changes and job scarcity are shifting every generation’s experience of work and the requirements of an effective workplace culture.
One constant is the need for leaders, managers and their teams to be able to exercise judgement and act under pressure.
This may increasingly become the essential value-add that humans bring, that AI cannot.
How well people use their judgement and act under pressure is not widely assessed in organisations. This is what motivated Interactive EQ to introduce its 2026 Behavioural Intelligence Index™.
They conducted more than 5,000 immersive simulations between April and December 2025, with more than 1,700 professionals. These ranged from C-suite executives and senior leaders to middle management and frontline roles. The simulations spanned 46 organisations across a wide range of industries.
Resonant findings
The findings that resonate most strongly with my own experience of working with clients on their culture are:
Accountability is not a trait, it’s contextual
Organisations often treat accountability as something people either have or lack. The research shows that even among senior professionals, accountability varies by scenario more than it does by person.
The level of perceived social risk, safety and consequence has a significant impact on the degree to which people take ownership and act.
In particular, accountability declines as the risk to personal reputation rises. People are more likely to deflect or escalate than act themselves.
When a more senior manager became unavailable during an active customer or stakeholder issue, one in four professionals stalled. This was despite knowing the correct action to take.
Accountability declines as the risk to personal reputation rises
When middle managers are under pressure, the link between strategy and execution fails
The findings go further still. They found that certain conditions in modern workplaces have intensified. For example, the need to hold peers to account, conflict across divisions or functions, giving feedback ‘up the hierarchy’ and reputational exposure.
When these variables were high, they found that despite skill and experience, middle managers’ mastery dropped as much as 70 per cent.
Sales and service are conditioned to act differently
The dynamic is especially acute amongst people in service roles. They are in a ‘double bind’, responsible for results but discouraged from acting independently.
Over time, this encourages people to protect their own reputation over finding resolutions and instead waiting, escalating or deferring.
This is different to sales environments where speed, initiative and recovery from failure are rewarded.
Frontline roles exhibit the largest gap between training and execution
Researchers found a mismatch between the training that customer facing teams are given. Mostly about procedural consistency, compliance and efficiency, and what matters most to customers.
Accountability varies by scenario more than it does by person
Why accountability matters
We frequently hear leaders complaining that their middle managers are not taking ownership. Not driving continuous improvement, not making decisions, not finding creative or more efficient ways of working.
Middle managers are the engine room of organisational performance. They are the linchpin between strategic direction set by senior leaders and creating conditions for their teams to deliver. They also have by far the biggest impact on their team’s engagement.
Assuming that a lack of accountability is due to an individual’s competency leads to the wrong solutions being put in place.
Instead of telling managers to take more ownership, or training them to ‘step-up’, senior leaders need to look at the cultural conditions they are creating for their managers:
- How much strategic context have they shared for the direction of travel?
- How clear are the outcomes the team needs to achieve as a priority, and the rationale for these?
- How much decision-making authority have they agreed with their managers?
- How do leaders respond when things go wrong?
- How often do they ask for direct challenge and feedback? Or controversial opinions or ideas?
Without psychologically safe conditions for decision making and risk taking, managers continue to sit on ideas for improvement and send decisions ‘up’ the hierarchy. This wastes time and money.
Bad news is avoided, defensiveness rises, candor disappears and learning is lost.
Senior leaders need to look at the cultural conditions they are creating for their managers
Avoiding learned dependency
Perhaps more damaging still, a culture of ‘learned dependency’ sets in where avoiding accountability becomes ‘the way we do things around here’.
This is then passed on from longer serving leaders to new ones. It becomes an even stickier problem to address and requires a whole system approach to cultural change.
In our experience, the knock-on impact on sustainable success is significant. Capable subject matter experts either diminish their contribution or choose to leave. Bottlenecks for decision making lead to slow delivery, lack of agility and create single points of failure.
From a customer attraction and retention perspective, the moments that matter most to customers – handling exceptions personally, resolving service failure with empathy – are not the areas being addressed in frontline training. As a result, the investment of time and budget is not leading to better outcomes.
KPMG’s 2025/26 UK Customer Experience Excellence report 2025/26 was astute in saying: “Humans will not disappear; they will move up the value chain. The contact centre of the future will be staffed by emotionally intelligent experts capable of navigating ambiguity, calming frustration, and resolving exceptions”
If the role human beings play is not understood and they are not recruited, developed and assessed accordingly, the gap between what customers expect and what organisations deliver will only widen.
Five actionable takeaways
1. Work with senior teams to create the conditions for accountability
In the dizzy heights of executive roles it can be easy to forget that their experience of the culture is not the same as those working in the middle or frontline of the organisation.
Culture is nobody’s ‘fault’, but with awareness and appetite for change they can address these unhelpful behaviours quickly.
Run a culture diagnostic or even just a few, safe space focus groups to get examples of how these dynamics are playing out and the impact on the business.
2. Strengthen key skills in all people leaders
Recent research from Mental Health First Aid England found that 33 per cent of people say better management training would help them be themselves. In addition, 34 per cent want leaders to visibly role model the culture they’re asking their teams to adopt and 45 per cent of managers want to build the confidence to do this, they just need the support.
Skills that are especially key:
- Empowering decision making and support learning when things go wrong
- Creating a culture that encourages constructive challenge and feedback
- Keeping a team ‘in flow’ when operating conditions are especially challenging
- Understanding how they and others behave under pressure and its impact
3. Initiate sales and service joint problem solving
Sales and service teams will always come at problems from different perspectives.
Instead of tolerating the friction and blockages that this causes, identify one problem or opportunity for them to solve collaboratively.
Treat it as a lab experiment, deliberately creating conditions for them to behave differently from the norm, focused on the shared goal of enhancing the customer experience and pooling their different perspectives to find better solutions.
4. Make sure your AI strategy still includes humans
Ensure your people strategy takes a holistic approach to how AI and people will work together to deliver better outcomes.
As AI starts to do the heavy lifting of repeatable processes and data analysis, develop empathy and judgement skills in frontline teams.
Reset expectations for their role as they move ‘up the value chain’. It’s important to motivate and reward them for making decisions outside of the written frameworks and giving customers the personal, empathetic experience they expect.
5. Showcase examples of the culture you want
As with any culture change, really shout about the success stories as people start to break old norms and behave in new ways.
Celebrate scenarios where someone has stuck their neck out, taken a personal risk and owned something that felt outside their comfort zone.
Shout about the success stories as people start to break old norms and behave in new ways
What next?
Interactive EQ’s research uncovers a number of reasons for the gap between strategy and execution and in our experience there are others that can also be addressed such as lack of context and clarity of outcome.
We also find that the wider cultural context has a significant impact on accountability.
Ironically, supportive, friendly places to work can often make it feel even riskier to speak-up or be candid. People fear rocking the boat, causing upset or offense and damaging their social standing, even if this is deeply unconscious.
The move to hybrid working adds another dynamic, often weakening relationships, in particular with people outside of the immediate team.
Difficult conversations are avoided, under-performance or poor behaviour goes unchecked and remote working gets blamed.
Wider research into the impact of these other contextual factors would be interesting to see.
With insight comes self-awareness and then resources can be prioritised to address the areas that will make the biggest difference to performance.
If you enjoyed this article, check out: The human cost of megamanaging: Why your leaders have an attention deficit
