A standard is only binding if the team accepts it as binding. Larendee Roos, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Roos Advisors, has spent three decades watching leaders miss that distinction. “Most leaders think accountability is something you enforce,” she says. “Set the expectation, follow up, and hold the line.” Most leaders assume a standard carries authority because of who set it, but Roos locates the authority elsewhere.
People rise to a standard when they trust the person setting it, and leaders fall back on enforcement when the standard has no standing of its own. Roos brings a background in psychology and executive consulting alongside experience running her own companies, and her sequence follows from that.
Why Enforcement Deepens the Problem It Solves
Enforcement carries a cost most leaders never account for. Every act of following up confirms to the team who the standard belongs to, and a standard the leader has to police is one the team learns to treat as the leader’s property rather than their own. The obligation to meet it lasts exactly as long as the attention behind it.
That produces the pattern Roos sees in struggling teams. A leader tightens the follow-up, the team responds while watched; performance slips the moment attention moves elsewhere, and the leader concludes the answer is more supervision. Each round teaches the same lesson more firmly. Enforcement works while it is applied and deteriorates the conditions that would let a leader stop applying it.
Knowing the People First
A leader has to earn the standing. As a DISC-certified partner (DISC – dominance, influence, steadiness, conscientiousness), Roos helps teams recognize their own strengths and preferences along with each other’s. The value is practical. A leader who has not learned how an individual works can only set an expectation for a generic person, and no such person sits on the team. When people feel seen, they open up, and trust begins there. An expectation calibrated to the actual individual reads as reasonable rather than arbitrary, and recognition converts a demand into an agreement.
Alignment Comes From Participation
Trust deepens when everyone understands the goal and their own part in reaching it. This is because people commit far more fully to something they helped shape. That gives a standard its second source of legitimacy. When a goal comes down from above, the team owes it nothing beyond compliance, since it belongs to whoever wrote it. Bring the same people into building it, and they now have their own work to protect. Alignment turns a room full of individuals into a team that moves together.
Accountability the Team Holds
Once trust and alignment are in place, the standard holds without the leader present. People hold themselves and each other accountable, and the leader stops chasing performance and starts seeing ownership. Roos calls this the shift that lasts. A standard backed by position survives only as long as someone is watching, while a standard the team considers legitimate keeps working in every room the leader never enters. The capacity that returns to a leader is substantial. The hours spent policing a standard were hours not spent on the work only they can do. The teams that Roos works with increase profits by an average of 35%, while building stronger relationships along the way.
A team that will not hold a standard without supervision is telling a leader something about the standard’s legitimacy, rather than about the team’s character. To learn more about building teams grounded in trust and accountability, connect with Larendee Roos on LinkedIn or visit Roos Advisors.
