Shared Fate: The Secret Ingredient for Accountable Teams

Think back to the best team you’ve ever been on. Maybe it was a sports team, a work project, or even a volunteer group. Chances are, it wasn’t just about the people being smart, skilled, or well-organized.

What really made it different was this: there was an experience of what happened to one, happened to all. In other words, there was a shared fate.

Having a real and meaningful shared fate on a team is what separates the teams that pull together and perform under pressure and adversity versus those that fracture and fail to perform. It is also the ingredient most teams inside organizations are missing.

The Problem with the Way Most Organizations Are Structured

Most organizations today are structured in a very hierarchical and siloed structure. We learn to structure our organizations like this in the early 1900s when companies started to scale and we had to figure out how to organize them. This model is actually based on the military, where the generals (CEOs) are at the top thinking, officers (middle managers) are in the middle doing the telling, and the soldiers (front line employees) are at the bottom doing what they are told.It is the middle manager’s responsibility to “hold the soldiers accountable” to make sure they do what they are told.

In this model, accountability flows upward. Employees spend more energy worrying about what the boss thinks than what the customer needs. People cover their own backs instead of covering each other’s. Participants avoid talking about the real issues, and leaders end up exhausted because they’ve taken the accountability onto their own shoulders.

It’s not that people don’t care. It’s that the system doesn’t encourage them to. When the hierarchy defines success as pleasing your superior, protecting the team — or the customer — takes a back seat.

What Shared Fate Looks Like in Action

On high-functioning teams, success and failure are collective. That’s the power of shared fate in teams.

• In sports, when someone is late to practice, the whole team runs. When someone misses a defensive assignment, the team owns the basket, not just the individual.
• In the military, boot camp drills send a clear message: it doesn’t matter when you finish; it matters when everyone finishes.
• In business, shared fate might look like a sales team celebrating together when they hit a quarterly goal, or an operations team rallying late into the night to get a product launch over the finish line.

Shared fate doesn’t just appear by accident. Leaders have to build it intentionally. That might mean:

• Making it difficult to get on the team, so membership carries pride and responsibility.
• Having the team be accountable for achieving a set of metrics together as a group, not just individually.
• Structuring rewards so results are tied to the collective, not just individuals.
• Creating pressure situations (deadlines, big goals, visible commitments) that force people to pull together instead of splinter apart.

When shared fate is real, people stop hiding. They start addressing the real issues instead of ignoring them, gossiping about them, or handing them to the boss. That’s the line between a “functional” team and an accountable team.

Why It’s So Hard to Build Here’s the rub: building an accountable team requires leaders to give up some control. That can be terrifying. When the team starts holding itself accountable, the boss isn’t the hero anymore and often feels like they aren’t needed.

For team members, it’s no easier. Being on an accountable team means they can no longer run to the boss like kids to a parent. They have to work things out with each other directly — like adults. That means having the hard conversations they’ve been avoiding, taking ownership of mistakes, and holding their peers to a higher standard.

That discomfort is exactly where accountability is born. Without it, people stay in their comfort zones — and comfort never built a championship team.

The Payoff of Shared Fate in Teams

Once a team establishes a real shared fate, everything changes.

• Trust grows. Team members know they can count on each other because they’ve been tested together.
• Accountability shifts. The burden no longer rests solely on the leader’s shoulders; it becomes distributed across the team.
• Focus expands. Instead of constantly looking up the org chart for approval, people start looking out for teammates and are focused on delivering results to the customer.

Shared fate in teams transforms a group of talented individuals into a true team. It’s what separates the groups that merely function from the ones that dominate.

A Challenge for Leaders

So here’s the challenge: what are you doing today to build shared fate in your team? Are you willing to create conditions where success is truly collective and failure is felt together?

Because in the end, shared fate isn’t just a leadership strategy. It’s a mindset shift. It’s the difference between carrying your team on your back and walking alongside them, shoulder to shoulder, toward a goal you all own together.

Want to learn more? Then check out Corinne’s discussion, Leading Accountable Teams as a First-Time CEO. The discussion includes a Q&A session with Vistage Chair Nancy Girres.

Related Resources

Enhancing Leadership Effectiveness: The Role of Accountability Teams

Accountability Should End in Performance, Not Pain

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