Day 2: How to Take True Accountability as a Leader (It’s Not What You Think)
What you consume shapes how you lead – and most leaders aren’t paying attention.
Coming Up
The one form of accountability most leaders completely ignore (and why it matters more than you think)
How to trace your irritability, stress, or pessimism back to what you’ve been consuming
Four practical ways to take control of what enters your mental space
Welcome back to Day 2 of the Leading Through Uncertainty Challenge!
If you’re a leader, then you’re probably very focused on external measures of success. Things like, did my team hit the deadline? Are we meeting our targets? Did that project get delivered on time?
You might be hitting all the right marks, but still left feeling irritable with your team, impatient during conversations, or pessimistic about projects – so where is that really coming from?
Yesterday, we talked about recognizing when your nervous system goes into fight-or-flight mode. Today, we’re asking a different question: What’s setting it off in the first place?
The answer might surprise you, and it’s something you have more control over than you think.
Before we dive in, here’s a reminder of what you can expect throughout this challenge:
Day 2: Take Accountability (You Are Here)
Day 3: Stay Within Your Three-Foot World
Day 4: Prepare for the Worst
Day 5: Understand Your Coping Style
What It Means to Be an Accountable Leader
When we talk about accountability in leadership, we usually mean being responsible for outcomes.
Did you hit your targets?
Did your team deliver?
Did you follow through on commitments?
But there’s another kind of accountability that rarely gets discussed: being accountable for your inputs (aka what you consume).
After all, what you expose yourself to shapes your emotional state and your leadership capacity.
Imagine that you spend 30 minutes scrolling news and social media before work. The headlines are alarming, the comments are angry, and by the time you close your phone, you feel anxious. Then you walk into your first meeting and snap at a colleague over something minor.
You notice the agitation. You might even feel guilty. But you probably don’t connect it back to the source – that time spent scrolling the news.
Being an accountable leader means taking ownership of what you allow into your mental and emotional space – not just what you produce from it.
Being mindful of your inputs doesn’t mean ignoring what’s happening in the world. You’re not sticking your head in the sand or pretending current events don’t exist. You have a responsibility to stay informed – both for yourself and your team.
But there’s a difference between being aware and being saturated.
The question isn’t whether you pay attention – it’s how much, when, and in what way. Your responsibility includes recognizing how those inputs influence your behavior and your leadership.
What Counts as an Input
Inputs aren’t just media consumption, though that certainly matters. They include everything that enters your awareness:
Media: Doomscrolling, constant news alerts, hours on social media – even background news playing while you work.
Conversations: The colleague who complains constantly. Gossip sessions. Venting calls that spiral into negativity.
Environments: Your cluttered desk. Constant notifications. Lack of boundaries that keep you in reactive mode all day.
Internal inputs: Replaying worst-case scenarios in your mind. Rehashing old conflicts. Letting your thoughts spiral without questioning them.
Your inputs are everything you allow into your mental space, including ambient exposure and mental habits. The news ticker running in the background while you eat lunch counts. So does the inner monologue that keeps rehearsing yesterday’s conflict instead of letting it go.
According to our research, Turbulent personality types, especially those who also have the Feeling trait, are most likely to say that reading and watching the news negatively affects them.
Tracing Your Outputs Back to Their Source
Most leaders can tell you exactly when they felt reactive or stressed, but very few can tell you what actually triggered it.
Once you learn to trace the connection, you’ll start seeing patterns everywhere. And those patterns give you something you haven’t had before: the power to change what happens next.
Here’s what tracing the connection looks like in real leadership situations:
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