Accountability means taking responsibility for your actions and decisions. When we’re accountable for them, we admit our mistakes and take ownership of our misdeeds instead of running away or denying them. This is such an important value to learn. After all, accountability should be applied day in and day out. For instance, we must accept responsibility for how we speak, act, and behave at school or work. These are situations where we make commitments that affect not only ourselves but for other people, too.
So, we must ensure we can keep and stand by those decisions. Being accountable for one’s actions is not easy. It means making difficult decisions, keeping promises, and admitting mistakes. There’s no doubt that it’ll be challenging. But, if you try to be more accountable each day than the day before, you’ll improve over time. The first step to being accountable is knowing your role and responsibilities. What areas of a particular job do you cover?
Once you’re aware of these things, do not forget to be honest and have integrity, especially when you need to stand up for your decisions. Being firm and resolute in your decisions is daunting, especially when they negatively affect something. But, you must remember that mistakes are a part of everyone’s life. Instead, you must own up to that misstep and commit to making better decisions the next time. Remember to live by your values, be honest, and always live with integrity.
Some of the best accountability quotes are listed below.
- “A culture of accountability makes a good organization great and great organization unstoppable.” – Henry Evans
- “Accountability and self-responsibility are critical to our success in personal, professional, and public life. However, we often look for those character traits in others, rather than inculcating them in ourselves.” – Vishwas Chavan
- “Accountability breeds response-ability.” – Stephen R. Covey
- “Accountability crumbles silos, boosts teamwork and collaboration, strengthens camaraderie, creativity, resiliency, agility, trust, and communication.” – Mike Evans
- “Accountability in friendship is the equivalent of love without strategy.” – Anita Brookner
- “Accountability is a key concept in moving an organization forward, especially in a challenging business climate.” – Cindy Tucker
- “Accountability is a statement of personal promise, both to yourself and to the people around you, to deliver specifically defined results.” – Brian Dive
- “Accountability is a two-way street. As a leader, you want to know that you can count on people to do what they said they would do. Likewise, your colleagues want to know that they can count on you as the leader to do what you have promised them.” – Greg Bustin
- “Accountability is first and foremost about being reliable. To get a good picture of your personal accountability, you may want to periodically ask yourself, ‘Can people count on me to do what I say I’ll do, as I said I would do it?’” – Henry J. Evans
- “Accountability is the glue that bonds commitment to results.” – Will Craig
- “Accountability is the issue! If you can’t find a way to get people to be accountable, you’re going to find it hard to make anything else work, let alone your business.” – Robert Lebow
- “Accountability is the line of control between human and animal behavior.” – Abhijit Naskar
- “Accountability is the measure of a leader’s height.” – Jeffrey Benjamin
- “Accountability is the only real beginning to change.” – Daniel Abbott
- “Accountability is the state or condition of being accountable or responsible. That is right. We are responsible for what goes on in our heads.” – John Faulkner
- “Accountability is where the cowardice of my teetering self-image is wrangled into submission by the force of my ethics.” – Craig D. Lounsbrough
- “Accountability means to say what you do, do what you say.” – Pearl Zhu
- “Accountability separates the wishers in life from the action-takers that care enough about their future to account for their daily actions.” – John Di Lemme
- “Accountability to others and for what you do begins with respect for who you are and your behavior.” – Byron Pulsifer
- “At the end of the day, we are accountable to ourselves – our success is a result of what we do.” – Catherine Pulsifer
- “Be accountable for doing the right things. This means ethical execution of the activities that will actually support the goals you have chosen for yourself.” – Sam Silverstein
- “Be brave and take accountability for your thoughts and beliefs.” – Jennifer Hyman
- “Break the riddle of accountability, the thinking goes, and you will have solved one of the thorniest issues in modern business.” – Mihnea Moldoveanu
- “Creating a culture of integrity and accountability not only improves effectiveness, but it also generates a respectful, enjoyable and life-giving setting in which to work.” – Tom Hanson
- “Good men prefer to be accountable.” – Michael Edwardes
- “Great companies have high cultures of accountability, it comes with this culture of criticism I was talking about before, and I think our culture is strong on that.” – Steve Ballmer
- “I believe that accountability is the basis of all meaningful human achievement.” – Sam Silverstein
- “If you made a choice to get in there and fight, you have to accept accountability for whatever happens.” – Roy Nelson
- “In a fast-changing and increasingly complex world, accountability of leaders is acquiring a renewed focus.” – R. Gopalakrishnan
- “In reality, we all have our lives, and the accountability for the achievement of our dreams and goals falls strictly on our own shoulders.” – Thomas Matt
- “In the years I’ve been thinking and talking about leadership, I’ve come to realize that the desperate need for accountable leaders is the fundamental challenge organizations are facing today.” – Vince Molinaro
- “It is not only what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable.” – Moliere
- “It’s just that we’re all accountable for our own happiness. And being happy does matter. It’s up to each of us to find out what shape or form that takes.” – Peter Jennings
- “Leaders are accountable for accountability.” – Dan Rockwell
- “Leaders inspire accountability through their ability to accept responsibility before they place blame.” – Courtney Lynch
- “Most goals people set are not achieved because they are not held accountable for them. When goals are made in private, they tend to fall off because people stop being motivated, stop focusing, and stop prioritizing.” – Bola Onada Sokunbi
- “My experience is that accountability is an extremely powerful tool to align an organization toward its objectives.” – Susan Gomez
- “One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned about habit development is that you need accountability to stick to a major goal. It’s not enough to make a personal commitment.” – S. J. Scott
- “Open collaboration encourages greater accountability, which in turn fosters trust.” – Ron Garan
- “Personal accountability requires mindfulness, acceptance, honesty, and courage.” – Anonymous
- “Simple organizational structure and clear accountability are necessary conditions for the exercise of effective leadership.” – John Adair
- “Take accountability. Blame is the water in which many dreams and relationships drown.” – Steve Maraboli
- “Taking personal accountability is a beautiful thing because it gives us complete control of our destinies.” – Heather Schuck
- “Teams keep leaders accountable for the goal. Individuals connected to no one can change the goal without accountability.” – John C. Maxwell
- “The benefit of truly accountable leaders is that they are able to create effective structures where their staff know what is expected of them, and can improve the business for customers.” – Jane Storm
- “The individual is not accountable to society for his actions in so far as these concern the interests of no person but himself.” – John Stuart Mill
- “The notion of accountability has emerged as a human tool to motivate people – do what you’re supposed to do, or you’ll be held to account.” – Art Horn
- “The time has come to carry accountability forward, to take it offline and into the real world. To share our lives with just a few people we really, truly, honestly trust.” – Craig Gross
- “To function effectively, a business requires leaders who are accountable for driving success.” – Barry Linetsky
- “Understanding the true meaning of accountability makes us strong and enables us to learn.” – Sameh Elsayed
- “We are all accountable for our actions, their effect and influence on our lives and the lives of others.” – Sameh Elsayed
- “We are all responsible and accountable for what we do or say even if those behaviors occur in stressful times.” – Byron Pulsifer
- “When accountability is present, people keep their eyes on a very clear prize. They know what they are working toward and how they are going to get there.” – Henry J. Evans
- “When it comes to privacy and accountability, people always demand the former for themselves and the latter for everyone else.” – David Brin
- “When people feel accountable and included, it is more fun.” – Alan Mulally
- “Where there is no accountability, there will also be no responsibility.” – Sunday Adelaja
- “Without accountability, there’s no civilization.” – Abhijit Naskar
- “You are accountable for your actions, your decisions, your life; no one else is, but you.” – Catherine Pulsifer
- “You must be accountable constantly to those demands that are made on your time, and it is only you that can allocate what time can be used for what purpose.” – Byron Pulsifer
- “You will not experience a dramatic change in your struggle as long as you use accountability to describe your sins instead of declaring your need for help in the midst of temptation.” – Heath Lambert
