Hard Decisions Define Leaders: Accountability and High Standards — with Joe Crandall

Did You Show Them What Right Looks Like? Joe Crandall on Hard Decisions and High Accountability

In this post: Former Navy SEAL and Red Leviathan CEO Joe Crandall explains why the decisions leaders avoid are the ones their teams need most, and how clear standards, fast feedback, and named owners build a culture of high accountability.

In the late 1990s, before 9/11, Joe Crandall was a young Navy SEAL platoon commander with a problem. Charlie Platoon was performing well, except for one man who was not living up to standards and was dragging the whole unit down with him.

It took Crandall a while to document the case and remove him. The moment he did, "the level of performance, the level of accountability went through the roof," Crandall said on Activating Greatness, the leadership podcast from Velocity Advisory Group. "It was because we were no longer having to work to the standards of an underperformer."

The man was not a bad guy, Crandall stressed. He was the wrong person for that platoon at that moment. Crandall has carried the lesson through a business career that now includes serving as CEO of Red Leviathan, which oversees a portfolio of veteran-owned companies, and as Executive Chairman of Greencastle, the strategy execution consultancy he previously led as CEO. Every person Greencastle has hired in the last seven years is a veteran.

His argument is simple and uncomfortable. The decisions most leaders avoid are the ones their teams need most, and avoiding them is not kindness.

Where 80% of the Problems Live

Crandall uses the EOS Traction framework and its people analyzer, but he starts one step earlier than many leaders do. Before you judge whether someone fits a seat, you have to define your culture: your core values, your standards, and what you expect people to do and not do. If a person does not pass that first test, he said, "you really have to ask yourself why are they even on the team."

After culture comes Traction's three questions: Do they get it, do they want it, and do they have the capacity to do it? Crandall treats the first two as nonnegotiable. Capacity is where he extends grace, because many of the veterans he hires can grow into skills they do not yet have.

"From a business standpoint, 80% or plus of your problems come from the wrong people or the wrong processes," he said. Fix the people, then the processes, and the team can perform without the leader in the room every day.

His shortcut for the people half is energy. Is this person adding to the team's energy naturally, or drawing it away? If the answer is neutral or negative, he said, you have to think long and hard about why they are still there.

The Question Before the Conversation

Leaders delay these calls because telling someone they are not doing a good job is hard, and it gets harder the longer you wait. Crandall leans on Kim Scott's Radical Candor and the EOS methodology to set clear standards and hold quick, direct conversations when someone falls short.

But when a manager tells him an employee "just isn't getting it," Crandall asks a question first: "Did you show them what right looks like?"

If the person knows what right looks like and still cannot deliver, that is useful information. If nobody ever showed them, the problem sits with the leader.

From there, conversations escalate in steps, with the person given every tool and chance to correct course. Done well, the final meeting is never a surprise, Crandall said, because the employee has already heard what the outcome could be.

The payoff shows up in retention. Crandall said Greencastle's monthly turnover runs under 0.5%, and more than a dozen former employees, whom the firm calls boomerangs, have come back.

"Anger and frustration are born out of missed expectations."

Joe Crandall, CEO, Red Leviathan

Salad in the Teeth

Crandall frames candor as care. Picture a colleague about to give a big presentation with a chunk of salad in his teeth. You tell him, because you care how he will be perceived. Staying quiet, he suggested, means you are not living up to your own culture.

He credits EOS creator Gino Wickman with the idea of making decisions from a position of love rather than fear. The opposite is what Scott calls ruinous empathy, which Crandall believes most organizations suffer from. Leaders excuse the behavior as a first offense or worry about holding someone's career back. "Maybe their career deserves to be held back," he said.

Timing matters as much as intent. Raise an issue three weeks late, and the other person wonders why you did not say something then. Even high performers want to know when they are slipping. Someone might excel at six tasks and struggle with a seventh. Jon Stenberg made a similar case for accountability, and Harry Barnick for difficult conversations.

Name the Owner, Remove the Frustration

Crandall's most quotable line came in a discussion about process. "Anger and frustration are born out of missed expectations," he said. If you expect a job done and it is not, you get angry. If you expect a paycheck on Friday and it does not arrive, you get angry.

For a year, every client contract that reached his desk had errors. When the team finally mapped the process, the person Crandall assumed was checking for errors believed that was his job. One clarification, and he never saw another error.

So Greencastle went further than naming core processes. Borrowing an idea from how Elon Musk assigns ownership of rocket parts, the firm put a name on every task, down to who lowers the flag to half-staff. Every process also has a primary and a secondary owner, a habit from military service captured in the phrase "one is none, two is one." That is what lets people take real vacations.

Crandall also takes what he calls tactical absences, skipping certain meetings so the person running them has to own the outcome. And he warns leaders not to confuse style with substance. If someone paints a car front to back instead of top to bottom and the result is as good or better, leave it alone.

Outcomes Over Effort

That focus on outcomes traces back to the best advice Crandall ever received, in SEAL training at BUD/S: "Don't confuse effort with performance."

"The only thing that matters is outcomes," he said. "And if you've clearly defined the outcomes, then you're going to have a good organization." The skill he considers most underrated follows from it: decision making and velocity of action. When a leader decides and nothing happens, he said, people see it and the organization starts to erode.

Key Takeaways

1. Define culture before judging fit. Core values and standards are the first filter for hiring, promotion, and removal. Capacity can grow over time, but someone who does not fit the culture should not be on the team.
2. Ask whether you showed them what right looks like. Before you conclude someone cannot do the job, confirm they were shown the standard.
3. Make the last conversation predictable. Escalate feedback in clear steps so no one is surprised by the outcome.
4. Put a name on every task. Unclear ownership creates missed expectations, and missed expectations create frustration. Assign a primary and a secondary owner.
5. Judge outcomes, not effort or style. If the result meets the standard, let people find their own way to it.

The Takeaway: Simple, Not Easy

Crandall's closing advice was short. Trust the EOS process, hold your people accountable, and reward them when they do well. "It's not hard," he said. "It's tedious."

That is the real test for leaders. The hard decision is rarely a mystery. The standard has to be written down, shown, and repeated, and the conversation has to happen this week instead of next quarter. Teams rise to the standards their leaders enforce, and they sink to the ones leaders tolerate.

Listen to the Full Episode

Hear Joe Crandall's full conversation with host Alec McChesney on Activating Greatness. Watch on YouTube, or listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.