Healthy Accountability as a Business Founder featuring Heide Olson, CEO, All In One Accounting

So those of you who are new to this podcast, please allow me to provide just a little bit of context.

So we think of ourselves as partners who work with leaders at every level with our clients to create a culture of healthy accountability.

And it was in 2023 that we launched the biggest research project we've ever done here because our clients were struggling with the healthy accountability equation around how goodness pays.

And so we did all the things.

We put a steering team together.

We did hundreds of interviews and we surveyed thousands of people.

And we learned a little bit about the state of accountability these days.

And that is that Two out of three people are afraid of accountability.

They find it to be a negative, punitive, investigative concept.

And two out of five, that's 40%, just see it as unfairly applied.

In other words, that managers play favorites.

And so those are two pretty sobering statistics.

The other flip side of the coin is that 9 out of 10 people really care about being accountable.

They want to deliver quality work on time.

That's a really good thing.

And 8 out of 10 told us they've seen firsthand that it improves business.

So one of the unifying stats that pulls that all together is that 74% of executives today know this is happening on their watch, but they don't know what to do about it.

So that's why we did the research.

And it's been so fascinating to talk to people like you.

You're one of the executives, so am I.

But you and I, as founders, we have this thing that we call a power bias.

And what I can do is predict that you're probably one of those people that thinks accountability is a really good thing and you're not afraid of it.

So I'm curious to find out when you hear all that statistics and I put the power bias thing out there, how do you react to that, Heidi?