John Kenney, CPRC, CEO, Cotney Consulting Group - November 2026
I have sat in plenty of management meetings where everyone knew a project had gone sideways but no one could clearly explain who owned the problem. Estimating pointed to field conditions. Operations pointed to an incomplete scope. The project manager said the crew was pulled in too many directions. Accounting was waiting on paperwork before billing could move forward. Everyone had a reason. What the company lacked was clear ownership. That is where accountability begins to break down.
In smaller roofing companies, this problem is often less noticeable because the owner is involved in almost everything. Estimating, scheduling, purchasing, project management, billing and even field issues eventually come back to one person. The structure may not be formal but responsibility is usually obvious because the owner is close enough to the work to see what is happening.
Growth changes that. As companies add people, departments and layers of supervision, the owner can no longer touch every decision. Project managers are added. Estimators specialize. Field supervisors take on more responsibility. Accounting becomes more structured. Sales teams grow. These are all a necessary part of building a larger organization but that also creates more places where responsibility can become blurred.
I have seen companies reach a point where everyone is busy, everyone believes they are doing their part, yet performance begins to drift. Margins tighten. Jobs take longer than expected. Billing gets delayed. Change orders sit too long. Rework increases. None of those problems may be large enough on their own to trigger immediate alarm but together they begin to change the business. The issue is often not effort. It is clarity.
Accountability is sometimes treated as a negative word because people associate it with discipline or blame. I look at it differently. Accountability means knowing who owns the result, what that result should look like and what happens when performance starts moving in the wrong direction. Several people may be responsible for pieces of a project but someone still needs to own the outcome.
Take a project manager. That person depends on estimating for a complete scope, purchasing for materials, field leadership for production and accounting for timely billing. None of those relationships remove the project manager’s responsibility for overall project performance. If the job is falling behind or costs are moving out of line, someone has to recognize it early and drive the response.
The same is true in estimating. An estimator depends on supplier pricing, production history, drawings, specifications and input from operations but still owns the completeness and accuracy of the estimate being submitted. Shared input does not mean shared accountability for the final result. This distinction becomes more
important as companies grow because without it, problems tend to circulate.
A project falls behind schedule. Operations say the crew was not available. The field says material arrived late. Purchasing says the order was placed based on the project manager’s request. The project manager says the schedule changed. By the time everyone explains their part, the problem has already affected production and possibly margin. That is the accountability gap.
Strong companies do not eliminate cross-department interaction. In fact, they encourage it. The difference is that they make primary ownership clear. People know who is expected to monitor the result, raise concerns and make sure corrective action occurs. That also means accountability has to be tied to measurable performance.
I do not believe companies need dozens of key performance indicators to manage well. Too many metrics create noise. The better approach is to identify the handful of numbers that tell leadership whether each major function is performing the way it should.
If labor productivity consistently runs behind estimate, someone needs to understand why and what is being done about it. If receivables are aging, someone should own the follow-up instead of assuming accounting will eventually handle it. If gross margin is declining, the discussion needs to go deeper than saying operations must improve. The value of measurement is not the report itself. It is the conversation the report creates.
I have seen companies review financial statements every month and still struggle to improve performance because the numbers were never connected back to operational ownership. Leadership could see that margins were declining but no one traced the variance to labor productivity, scope gaps, purchasing, change-order
management or another specific cause. Knowing a number changed is not enough. Someone has to understand why.
This is where regular management review becomes important. A good leadership meeting should not be a long discussion about everything that happened during the month. It should focus on the areas where performance moved away from expectations and what is being done about it.
If labor hours are trending over budget, what changed? If a project is slipping, what is preventing recovery? If billing is behind, what is missing? If the bid-hit ratio has changed dramatically, is the issue pricing, project selection, scope or market conditions? Those discussions become much more productive when everyone knows who owns the next action.
There is another side to accountability that companies sometimes overlook: authority. It is difficult to hold someone accountable for a result when that person has no ability to influence it. I have seen project managers expected to control schedules without having meaningful input into crew allocation; department managers held responsible for costs while purchasing decisions were made somewhere else. I have seen supervisors expected to improve field production but given little authority to address repeated performance problems. That creates frustration rather than accountability.
If someone owns an outcome, that person needs enough authority, information and support to act on it. This does not mean every manager operates independently. It means responsibility and decision-making have to be reasonably aligned. Otherwise, accountability exists only on paper.
One of the most damaging conditions I see in growing companies is what I call silent tolerance. Leadership knows performance is slipping but allows it to continue because the company is busy, revenue is strong or the person involved has been with the organization for a long time. Nothing happens immediately, so the issue gets pushed to another month. Eventually, the exception becomes the standard.
If late reports are accepted often enough, reporting is no longer expected on time. If poor close out discipline is tolerated, projects remain open longer. If supervisors are allowed to miss production expectations without meaningful review, those expectations stop carrying much weight. Culture is shaped just as much by what leadership tolerates as by what it says. That does not mean every variance should result in confrontation. Roofing is too unpredictable for that. Weather changes. Customers change schedules. Materials arrive late. Existing conditions are not always what the drawings showed. Good managers understand the difference between a legitimate exception and a repeating pattern.
Accountability works best when expectations are clear, measurements are consistent and people know how performance will be reviewed. Most employees can work within that environment because there are fewer surprises. Problems begin when standards change depending on the project, the person or how busy the company happens to be that month.
As we move toward year-end, this is a good time for owners to look at the organization differently. Instead of focusing only on budgets and next year’s revenue goals, look at where responsibility becomes unclear. Where do decisions routinely stall? Which problems continue to appear in management meetings? Where do managers believe someone else owns the issue? Which responsibilities repeatedly find their way back to the owner because no one else is clearly expected to carry them? Those areas tell you something about the structure.
If every significant problem still has to reach the owner before action occurs, the company may have added people without really transferring ownership. That eventually limits growth because the organization becomes larger while decision-making remains centralized.
Clear accountability is one of the ways a business moves beyond that point. It also helps with succession. When responsibilities are understood, measurements are established and managers know what success looks like, new leaders have something to step into. They are not forced to recreate expectations based on how the previous person happened to manage the role.
After more than four decades in this industry, I have seen companies with talented people, strong backlogs and good intentions still struggle because no one clearly owned the result. The problem was rarely effort. It was clarity. As companies grow, that clarity has to be built into the organization instead of continuing to live in the owner’s head.
Strong accountability does not mean creating a harsher workplace. It means making expectations clear, giving people enough authority to act and reviewing results often enough that problems do not have time to become habits. When people understand what they own and how performance is measured, the company becomes easier to manage and far less likely to drift.
Growth creates more moving parts. Accountability is what keeps those parts working toward the same goal.
For more information, contact John at jkenney@cotneyconsulting.com or 813-851-4173.