Manager Mentor
Welcome to the era of "open accountability"
Series: 50 Most Pressing Questions Facing Managers in 2026
Every manager in 2026 is going to have to answer this question:
How do I make accountability open and transparent?
When I was at Cisco, senior leaders would frequently say: “Did he do what he said he would do?”
So much of accountability in the boomer generation centered on personal behavior. It was personal, relational, and reputation-based. The corporate structure of the boomer era created enough ambiguity that it actually encouraged passive-aggressive behaviors — where agreeing in public, but not so in private, was common.
Personal follow-through became the visible face of accountability. “Your word was your currency,” as former Cisco CEO John Chambers told me many times.
On the other hand, millennials and gen-z have a different “face” of accountability: agents.
And I think it’s going to be the best thing that ever happened to accountability.
What’s New:
Here’s what I mean: boomers were awful and, at best, inconsistent when it came to accountability. It mostly didn’t matter to career progression: the corporate ladder was always there to save people with a predictable path forward.
And here’s what every boomer reading this knows is true: people got ahead who shouldn’t have gotten ahead.
Millennials and gen-z don’t have that luxury. They know all they control is their story. The best people today want managers who can help them write it — and accountability is an essential part of any bestselling story.
My own research and others have determined this fact: millennials and gen-z want to work for a manager who is more authentic and less political than the boomer generation. More than 80% of millennials and gen-z put openness and transparency at the top of their list when evaluating potential employers. My own experience has taught me that this generation really cares about fairness.
And here is the crazy optimistic thing: agents are going to make accountability even more open, more objective and less subjective. The agents doing, for example, business value metrics or driving pipeline through internal data have to be openly designed and tested against a known set of outcomes.
Here’s why this matters to managers: the best people want to be the ones managing the agents. They know “open accountability” is their best friend. They know if they outperform, their work will be objectively superior.
In the not too distant future, I don’t think it will ever have been easier to be accountable for something. It still means you need to perform, but at least you know it won’t be political.
ARE YOU A CONSISTENT MANAGER? Less than 2 minutes:
Why this matters:
Alignment and accountability are the bookends of a high-performing team.
Alignment assures everyone is playing their position relative to the team’s priorities, goals and metrics. Accountability puts a name to a set of responsibilities on your dashboard.
Agents bind alignment and accountability into an “open” system.
Your job as a manager is to teach your people how to manage agents — because the lens of accountability is on them now — for better or worse.
My final team at Cisco was largely made up of hardware and software engineers. Before I worked with them, I wasn't that familiar with ideas like validation, verification and testing.
But now I am — and your best people need to be too. Those aren't software concepts anymore. They're management skills.
