Earlier this year I sat down with Sally Gibson for Corey-osity Unleashed. Sally is Managing Director at Dawleys, and her team has won Employer of the Year. Partway through our chat she pointed me to Greg Bustin's work on accountability and rattled off a short list. I haven't been able to shake it since.
Every person on your team needs answers to five questions:
- Why am I here?
- What's expected of me?
- How am I doing?
- What's in it for me?
- Where do I go for help?
No software. No annual survey. No consultant. If your people answer all five without hesitating, accountability stops being a fight. If they stumble on two of them, you've found your problem... and it isn't them.
I'm not sure about this part: Bustin's published framework is his Seven Pillars of Accountability. I couldn't find these five questions word for word in his public writing, so the list might be Sally's distillation of his ideas rather than his own phrasing.
Why five questions beat a culture deck
Most leaders treat accountability as a conversation you have after something goes wrong. Bustin rejects this. He interviewed leaders at companies like Southwest Airlines, Marriott and Nucor, gathered data from more than 6,000 executives, and came away with one blunt line:
"If you believe driving performance and holding people accountable is all about having a tough conversation... you will miss the bigger point."
His point is about culture. You don't get accountability by chasing people. You get it by setting up the conditions where people know what they owe and why.
The five questions are those conditions, shrunk down to something you'd fit on an index card.
When I ran my own research into bad bosses, 99.5% of respondents told me they'd had one or more types of bad boss. I'd bet most of those bosses left two or more of these questions hanging. Nobody sets out to be a bad boss. They forget to answer the basics, then wonder why the team drifts.
Gallup has been asking these for decades
None of this is soft. Gallup's Q12 engagement survey has measured four of these five questions for years, under different names:
- Why am I here? maps to Q08: "The mission or purpose of my company makes me feel my job is important."
- What's expected of me? is Q01: "I know what is expected of me at work." Gallup calls clear expectations "the most basic and fundamental employee need."
- How am I doing? is Q11: "In the last six months, someone at work has talked to me about my progress."
- Where do I go for help? sits close to Q02: "I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right."
So how are we doing on the basics? Badly. In the first half of 2026, only 49% of US employees strongly agreed they know what's expected of them at work. The peak was 61% in 2015. Half the workforce turns up each morning unsure what the job is.
Let's take the questions one at a time.
1. Why am I here?
This one sounds like a philosophy class. It isn't. It's the difference between an engineer who closes tickets and an engineer who knows which customer suffers when the ticket stays open.
Gallup's 2026 data shows slight declines in people feeling their opinions count and feeling connected to the company's purpose. Those declines offset the gain in clear expectations. Gallup calls this "a continuing problem of detachment." People know a bit more about what to do and a bit less about why it matters.
You fix this by connecting the work to a person. Not a mission statement on the wall. A real customer, a real colleague, a real outcome. Tell your developer who uses the feature. Better yet, put them in the room with the user for an hour.
2. What's expected of me?
Here's the one we fail most, and the one we're most confident we've covered. "It's in the job description." Sure. Gallup found employees who strongly agree their job description matches the work they do are 2.5 times more likely to be engaged. Most job descriptions don't match the work, so you've got a gap from day one.
I wrote about this in Nobody Wrote Down What Great Looks Like. Skills lists don't tell anyone what good output looks like. Write down the outcomes. Rank them. Check in on them monthly. If you have to explain what you expected after the deadline, you never set the expectation.
3. How am I doing?
Gallup's feedback research opens with this exact question, "How am I doing?", and then gives the number: 80% of employees who say they got meaningful feedback in the past week are fully engaged. Employees whose manager gives daily feedback are 3.6 times more likely to strongly agree they're motivated to do outstanding work than those who get it once a year.
And here's the catch. In a Gallup study of nearly 15,000 employees, only 16% said their last conversation with their manager was extremely meaningful.
So most of us are talking to our people. We're not telling them anything. If you say nothing, your team fills the gap with their own story, and it's rarely the kind one. I covered this in Your Silence Is Feedback.
4. What's in it for me?
Leaders flinch at this one. It sounds selfish. It isn't. It's the most honest question on the list.
Your people trade hours of their life for this job. They want to know what they get back: pay, skills, a path to the next role, a reference worth having, work they're proud to show. When you dodge the question, you tell them the answer is "nothing I'm willing to say out loud."
Answer it per person. Your senior engineer who wants to move into architecture needs a different answer from your junior who wants to learn the codebase without drowning. One answer for the whole team means you answered nobody.
5. Where do I go for help?
Gallup says having the materials and equipment to do the work is the strongest indicator of job stress across all twelve Q12 elements. Help is a resource. When people don't know who owns the build pipeline, who approves the spend, or whether asking a question makes them look weak, they stall. Then someone blames them for stalling.
Picture a new engineer stuck for two days on a broken local environment because nobody told them which channel to ask in. Two days of salary gone, and a quiet lesson learned: "Around here, you're on your own."
This matters more now with AI tools landing on every desk. Gallup's same 2026 report found employees whose manager actively supports the team's use of AI have an engagement rate of 48%, against 30% for those who don't. Same tools. Different answer to "where do I go for help?"
Run the five-question audit this week
Here's how I'd do it. It takes an hour per person, spread over a month.
Step 1: Ask, don't assume
In your next one-on-one, ask each person to answer the five questions out loud, in their own words. No prep. No right answers. Write down what they say.
Step 2: Answer them yourself
Before you compare, write your own answers for this person. What do you think their purpose is? What do you expect? How are they doing? What's in it for them? Where should they go for help?
Step 3: Compare and close the gaps
Wherever your answer and theirs don't match, you've found work. Not their work. Yours. Pick the biggest gap and fix it in the next two weeks.
Step 4: Repeat every quarter
Roles change. Priorities shift. People grow. Answers go stale fast, especially question two. Gallup's data on expectations dropping since 2015 tells you this isn't a one-time fix.
Accountability starts with your answers
We love to talk about holding people accountable. I'd rather talk about whether we've held up our end first. You don't get to demand results from someone who doesn't know why they're here, what you want, how they're doing, what they get, or where to turn.
Answer the five questions, and most of your accountability problems shrink before you ever need the tough conversation.
So here's your challenge. Pick one person on your team. Ask them the five questions tomorrow. Which one made them pause... and how long has it been since you answered it?