What responsibility comes with having a seat at the leadership table? Leadership accountability goes beyond holding authority or identifying problems. It requires executives to speak up when decisions overlook serious risks, challenge assumptions, and consider how their choices affect employees and the organization.
Using TD Bank’s compliance failures as an example, the article explores how protecting one’s position can undermine sound judgment and why leadership development must prepare executives to raise difficult concerns. Ultimately, responsible leadership means using influence to turn warnings into meaningful action, even when speaking up carries professional or political consequences.
TD Bank and the Cost of Warnings Without Action
On October 10, 2024, TD Bank’s U.S. entities pleaded guilty to charges involving money laundering and failures in their anti-money-laundering controls. They agreed to pay more than $1.8 billion in a Justice Department resolution. A separate regulatory order restricted the growth of its U.S. banks.
The warnings had been there for years. According to court documents summarized by the Justice Department, regulators and the bank’s own auditors repeatedly identified problems with transaction monitoring. Senior executives enforced spending limits anyway, holding budgets flat as profits and risks grew.
The warnings reached people who could act. They never became adequate funding, staffing, or controls. So what do you do when you know there is a problem and have the authority to act?
I have watched leaders who once spoke plainly start to edit themselves as they got closer to power. Choosing your words with care is a form of judgment. Leaving out facts the room needs is self-protection.
Access gives you something new to lose. It also makes you answerable for what gets decided in that room.
“The boss doesn’t have to ask for agreement. People learn when speaking up could cost them their place in the room.”
This is why I believe we need a broader view of leadership development and leadership responsibility. A seat in that room gives you influence that most people will never have. The test is what you do with it. If you can see a serious risk and shape the response, saying you raised it is not enough. Your job is to help the room decide what to do.
Why Does Access Create Greater Leadership Responsibility?
Picture an executive team reviewing a plan to cut customer-service staff and hold response times steady. The savings are clear. The operations leader knows the team already struggles to clear its backlog. The CHRO knows the people who remain will carry more work. Neither concern is in the recommendation.
Both know something that could change the decision. If they speak, the team can ask whether the work will be eliminated, moved, or left to fewer people. If they stay quiet, employees inherit a promise no one tested.
That is why access is stewardship. Your seat gives you temporary influence over decisions that can outlast your time in the role, and the chance to question a plan before someone else has to live with it.
Preparing someone for an executive role takes more than strategy, communication, and executive presence. It means preparing them to speak when the facts do not support the plan the boss wants. Authority and accountability should rise together.
How Do Leaders Start Protecting Their Seat?
No one reaches the senior team by accident. Once you arrive, you have something valuable to lose. You start to wonder whether raising a concern will cost you a relationship or the next promotion. The facts have not changed. The price of saying them has.
So you start doing the math. Is this worth upsetting the person who helped you get here? Do you back the plan with momentum, or ask the question that slows it down? Some of that is discernment. It becomes self-protection when the math changes what you are willing to say.
In the staffing review, the backlog becomes “temporary pressure.” The shortage of people becomes “an opportunity to work smarter.” The new words make the plan easier to approve. Calling it a stretch goal does not put another person on the shift.
Diplomacy gives you choices about when and how to raise a concern. You can raise it privately, without embarrassing anyone. What you cannot do is let it die before it reaches the people deciding. Protect the seat long enough, and you change what the seat is worth.
Who Are You Responsible for When You Have a Seat at the Table?
One of my favorite questions during an important decision is, “Who absorbs the cost?” The answer depends on where you sit.
The staffing plan shows a lower payroll expense. It does not show the extra work for those who remain, the errors that follow a growing backlog, or the customers waiting longer for help. Executives leave satisfied with the savings. Employees go back to a workload the plan never accounted for.
“Senior leaders cannot anticipate every consequence. No one expects them to be the personal representative for every single person affected by the decision. Their responsibility is to ensure that important considerations and realities have a chance to enter the discussion before the decision is finalized.”
The people closest to the consequences often have the clearest warning and the least access to the room. Before you approve the cut, ask the supervisor handling the backlog how the team will get through the work. What can actually stop? What happens to the rest? Carry those answers into the recommendation.
A strategy can be financially sound yet still place an unreasonable burden on people who were never part of the discussion. You may have to cut costs. You still have to ask whether the remaining team can do the work. If the savings depend on work no one has time to do, you have only moved the problem onto people who had no say. The spreadsheet shows what the decision produces. Judgment asks who pays for it.
Loyalty to the Room Is Not Loyalty to the Organization
Executive teams need enough trust to disagree and keep working together. That trust should make it easier to question a plan, even when the boss is invested in it. A team can agree because the plan held up under questioning. It can also agree because everyone knows which objections are unwelcome.
“The irony is that as an executive room becomes easier to manage, it becomes less useful. Friction disappears when teammates make political decisions rather than operational ones.”
From the outside, those two meetings look identical. The difference shows up when the work starts. One team named the staffing shortage and planned for it. The other approved the savings and never asked how the service would be delivered.
Megan Reitz and Amy Edmondson warn that a failed attempt to speak up can produce lasting silence. If the operations leader’s concern is treated as disloyalty, everyone else in the room learns to stay quiet. The next plan may look stronger only because fewer people will question it.
Constant disagreement is no more useful than constant compliance. The job is to bring forward what could change the decision and help the team work through it. You can disagree and still support the final decision. Just stay honest about the risk it carries.
What Do You Do When There Is No Safe Thing to Say?
Start with the decision in front of you. What are we promising, and can the team deliver it? Put the promised response times next to the current workload and headcount. Then ask which parts of the plan rest on evidence and which are assumptions.
In difficult situations, I return to a few questions that guide my decision-making:
What is the truth of the situation as I currently understand it?
What am I being pressured to leave unsaid?
Who will absorb the cost of the path we are considering?
What can I do, with the authority I have, to address it?
Those questions do not make the decision easy. They show me whether I am facing a real constraint or building a reason to stay quiet. Then I have to decide what I can do about it.
Bring a recommendation with the concern. Ask how much work the team handles, how long customers wait, and what work the plan eliminates. The answer may be to change the process, accept longer response times, or stage the cuts. Say what each option costs and who pays.
It can sound like this: “We’re planning to cut staff and keep the same response times. What work are we removing, and how do we know the remaining team can handle what’s left?” If no one can answer, say what you need to see before you can support the plan.
How Can CEOs and CHROs Turn Access Into Accountability?
If you run the meeting, hear from the people closest to the work before you announce your preference. Tell them what you will do with their concerns. If you still believe the plan should go ahead, say why. An invitation to speak is performance theater if the decision is already made.
McKinsey’s guidance on better decision-making meetings draws a useful line between the people who make the decision and those who advise, recommend, or carry it out. Be clear whether the supervisor is there to explain the workload, recommend a change, or help decide. Everyone in the room should know who can approve the final plan.
Give every serious concern an owner and a review date. Write down the assumptions behind the decision. If the cuts go ahead, agree on how you will watch response times and the backlog, and decide now what would force a change.
The owner needs the authority, time, and staff to do the job. Responsibility without them is a setup for failure. At TD Bank, essential projects were postponed or canceled while the compliance program stayed underfunded and understaffed.
When a decision goes badly, look at who knew what, who could act, and what they did. The person who raised the warning answers for their own work, not for a decision they had no authority to make. That is the difference between accountability and scapegoating.
When you decide whom to promote, ask for a time when the leader made a hard recommendation. What did they raise, what did it cost them, and what happened next? Did they change their view when the evidence changed? Did they follow through?
Those answers tell you more than a polished presentation. If equally capable leaders rise faster by keeping uncomfortable facts out of the conversation, the organization learns the lesson. Promotions tell people what you value, whatever you teach in a leadership development program.
“Senior leadership development should prepare people to carry the responsibility that comes with proximity to power. This means exercising judgment under pressure and creating productive friction without making it personal. It requires leaders to remain consistent even as the professional and political costs of consistency rise.”
Practice this on real decisions. Can the leader explain how the team will deliver the promised service after the cut, and how they will revise the plan when a flaw is found?
The executives already in the room set the standard. If you ask for candor, show people what happens after they speak. Thank someone for a concern and do nothing with it, and you have taught them not to raise the next one.
If you have less authority, start with the decisions you own. Put the concern in writing, make your recommendation through the proper channels, and ask who will make the decision. You may not change the answer. You can still be clear about what you know and who can act on it.
The Responsibility of the Room
Go back to the staffing review. The cuts may still go ahead. But this time, the team has tested whether the remaining staff can deliver the promised service. Employees know what work stops and what is still expected. No one discovers the trade-off through an impossible workload.
When the backlog grows, a manager knows who can approve a change before the problem compounds.
For me, that is part of coherence under pressure. I can change my mind when the facts change. I can adapt to a real constraint. What I will not do is let the facts I bring forward depend on how powerful the person across the table is. One Life. One Standard. More authority means more responsibility for what I do with what I know.
At TD Bank, the warnings were known long before the penalties arrived. Ask what happens in your organization after a serious concern reaches the senior team. Has anyone decided what to do? Does the person responsible have the means to do it? If you have the authority to act, the response belongs to you.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
1. What does leadership responsibility mean at the executive level?
At the executive level, leadership responsibility means using your access, information, and influence thoughtfully. Senior leaders often make decisions that affect people who are not present, so they need to raise important risks, ask tough questions, and consider who will be affected.
2. Why does leadership responsibility increase with proximity to power?
As leaders move closer to senior decision-making, they gain more context and influence. This access lets them see information, risks, and trade-offs that others might miss. With more power comes a greater responsibility to use that insight wisely, not just as a sign of status.
3. How can leaders avoid protecting their seat instead of using it?
Leaders can avoid focusing on self-protection by noticing when it starts to affect their judgment. If they begin to hold back to protect relationships, reputation, or future opportunities, they might withhold important information from the organization. Good leadership means sharing the truth, even when it is uncomfortable.
4. Why do some senior leaders become more cautious after gaining influence?
When senior leaders gain influence, they often feel they have more at stake. Their reputation, relationships, access, and future chances can seem more fragile. This can make them more cautious about raising concerns. The problem comes when careful judgment turns into always holding back.
5. Who should leaders consider when making decisions in executive rooms?
Leaders need to consider everyone affected by a decision, including employees, customers, frontline managers, future leaders, and other stakeholders. Part of leadership is asking who will bear the cost, especially when those people are not present for the decision.
