How to Hold People Accountable in Peer-to-Peer Relationships

Make Agreements and Lead with Curiosity When They're Broken

Great leaders hold people accountable. But they do it in a way that ultimately feels supportive, not oppressive. As I wrote in another article, fundamentally the best leadership theory I know describes it as two distinct things: support and challenge. Not as a balance, but as two independent aspects (i.e. you can be high or low in either one).

But for many, accountability often gets tangled up with punishment. This is especially problematic in peer-to-peer or decentralized organizations, where there’s no boss looming overhead, holding someone accountable can feel awkward. You don’t want to overstep, you don’t want to create drama, and honestly, it’s just easier to let small things slide. Until they stack up. And then it's not so small anymore.

Accountability vs. Punishment

Punishment comes with an emotional charge: blame, shame, and frustration. It suggests the other person did something wrong, and now they need to feel bad about it.

Accountability says: Something happened that didn’t match what we agreed to. Let’s talk about it. It’s clean. It’s centered. It doesn’t need to carry heat to carry weight.

Punishment looks backward—it fixates on what went wrong. Accountability looks forward—it asks, how do we realign? What’s needed now to repair trust, clarify expectations, or shift behavior?

What Makes Accountability Feel Safe(r)

If you want to hold someone accountable without them bracing for a fight, structure matters. I don’t mean rules-for-the-sake-of-rules, I mean the agreed-upon boundaries and expectations the group defined to get alignment towards their shared purpose.

When accountability becomes about you and how you feel, it gets murky. But when there’s a shared standard, it’s easier to point to the expectation rather than the person.

Here are some structure-building questions to ask in advance:

• What agreements do we have about communication, follow-through, or reliability?

• What happens when someone drops the ball and how do we name it?

• Are we aligned that naming it early is part of being in integrity?

If these aren’t clear, accountability always risks being experienced as merely someone’s interpersonal judgment.

Emphasize Enforcement Over Exploring

Once we know that accountability is not about punishment, we are more likely to see that the key to accountability is really about enforcement. But rather than enforcing oppressive rules that someone else imposed upon you, you are enforcing consciously-made agreements that you have freely made with others.

But the real trick here is to understand that while getting clear on what’s to be expected and making sure people consent to their agreements without coercion are (technically) equally important to enforcement, I can tell you from my experience that the emphasis on getting clarity up front can also be a trap.

It’s a trap because we like defining things. We like getting clarity on who is supposed to do what. We like sharing and exploring together. And even if it is a bit uncomfortable at times, it’s an intrinsically rewarding exercise. You feel like you accomplished something because the group now has a shared map, and you can trust that everyone will act responsibly and stick to this agreement....right!?

The problem is conflating one’s personal responsibility with rigid adherence to a rule or agreement. I’ve written about how it generally makes things better to think in terms of the intention to adhere rather than rigid adherence, because if you fail to make that distinction then when someone inevitably steps out of bounds, rather than saying something about it from your own sense of relational responsibility, you just silently judge or blame them for not living up to theirs.

The trap of “getting clarity” is that you can spin your wheels over-and-over defining and redefine expectations, but if you never actually require each other to live-up to them, then you’re only enabling each other, not leading.

What to Say: Just Ask

So, what does healthy peer-to-peer accountability look like and how do we do it? The secret is to lead with curiosity. When you think someone has failed to follow an agreed upon rule or expectation, start with a question. Or at least a curious tone.

So, you might say:

• “Hey, can I check something with you real quick? We’d said X, but Y happened. Did I miss something?”

• “I noticed something and figured it’s better to bring it up now than let it linger—what’s your take?”

• “Can we pause for a second? I’m feeling a bit off about what just happened—I want to make sure we’re still on the same page.”

The point isn’t to corner someone; it’s to open a space for interpretation. Your first move should always be to get a sense of whether they see it as a broken agreement, too.

The best accountability check-ins feel like alignment conversations, not interrogations. You’re not calling someone out—you’re calling them in, and you’re inviting their view. You’re simply holding up a mirror.

In Flat Structures, Accountability Is Leadership

In hierarchical orgs, people assume someone else will deal with it. In self-managed systems, if you don’t say something, no one will. Or, if they do, it’s a bonus; not an expectation.

That’s not dysfunctional. It’s the design. But it does mean you can’t wait for “the right person” to step in. If you see the tension, you’re it.

That doesn’t mean you have to come down hard. It just means you have to say something. Holding people accountable in self-managed spaces is about making tensions visible without adding tension to the room.

Closing: Accountability as an Act of Care

The best accountability I've seen doesn’t come from formal authority or airtight systems. It comes from people who care enough to stay in relationship while telling the truth.

It’s easy to avoid these moments. It’s easy to convince ourselves it’s not worth it, that someone else will deal with it, or that we’re being too sensitive. But every time we choose to say nothing, we teach each other that our agreements are flexible in all the wrong ways.

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