Journal of Financial Planning: February 2026
Cameron Logar, CRPC, CPTD, is founder of Next Peak Advisors (www.nextpeakadvisors.com), a consulting firm dedicated to helping registered investment adviser (RIA) firms elevate their talent strategy, drive growth, and build scalable organizational structures. She is a seasoned talent strategist and practice management expert with nearly two decades of experience in the financial services industry.
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Most RIAs don’t struggle because their people aren’t capable. They struggle because, over time, responsibility becomes blurred.
In the early days of a firm, accountability feels almost automatic. Everyone knows who is doing what. Decisions happen quickly. If something breaks, the answer to “who is responsible for this?” is usually obvious, or it’s the founder, who is close enough to everything that nothing is too far out of scope. But growth changes that.
As firms add clients, advisers, and infrastructure, the informal systems that once worked begin to unravel. Tasks get handed off without clarity. Decisions slow down. Leaders find themselves asking the same questions over and over: Why didn’t this get done? Who was supposed to handle that? Why did this escalate so late?
These are not operational failures. They are cultural signals that accountability and responsibility have not kept pace with growth.
When Growth Outruns Clarity
In my work with RIAs, I often see a similar pattern emerge around the 10–25 employee mark. The firm is doing well by most external measures. AUM is up, clients are happy, new hires are coming in, but internally, leaders feel increasing friction.
This experience aligns closely with findings from the Charles Schwab RIA Benchmarking Study, which has consistently shown that as advisory firms grow, organizational complexity tends to increase faster than revenue and headcount (Charles Schwab 2023). As firms scale, informal role clarity and decision-making (often sufficient in earlier stages), begin to break down if they are not intentionally redesigned.
The symptoms are familiar:
- Well-meaning people stepping on one another’s toes
- Decisions being revisited after the fact
- Team members hesitating to act without explicit approval
- Founders feeling pulled back into day-to-day issues they thought they had delegated
At this stage, leadership teams often assume the solution is better communication, more meetings, or tighter oversight. In reality, the deeper issue is usually a lack of shared clarity around who is responsible for what, and what accountability actually means inside the firm.
Accountability Is Not About Control
One of the most common misconceptions I encounter is that accountability requires more monitoring, reporting, and supervision. Research from Gallup consistently demonstrates that employees perform best when expectations are clear and well understood (Gallup 2023). Gallup’s workplace research identifies clarity around roles and responsibilities as a foundational driver of engagement, discretionary effort, and performance.
True accountability is not about control. It is about alignment. It exists when three conditions are present:
- People understand what outcomes they are responsible for.
- They have the authority to influence those outcomes.
- Expectations are consistent and visible across the organization.
When any one of these breaks down, accountability becomes performative. People appear busy, meetings multiply, but responsibility quietly shifts upward or disappears altogether.
The goal is not to tighten the reins but to remove ambiguity.
Moving Beyond Job Descriptions
Most firms already have job descriptions. Very few have role clarity. Traditional job descriptions tend to focus on activities and rarely articulate the results a role is accountable for, or how that role fits into the broader system.
In growing RIAs, accountability strengthens when roles are reframed around a few core questions:
- What outcomes does this role exist to drive?
- What decisions can this role make independently?
- Where is collaboration required?
- What does success look like when this role is performed exceptionally well?
When roles are defined this way, accountability becomes structural rather than personal.
Decision Rights: The Hidden Lever
As RIAs grow, unclear decision-making often becomes a hidden source of friction. If people are accountable for results but don’t know what they can actually decide, they’re going to pause. Things slow down. Small problems get pushed up the chain. Momentum disappears.
This often shows up in questions like:
- Who can approve a client exception?
- Who has discretion over pricing or fee adjustments?
- Who decides when a process needs to change?
- Who owns the final call when priorities conflict?
When the answers to these questions aren’t clear, confusion is inevitable. When they are clear, things move faster almost immediately. Most people aren’t avoiding responsibility because they don’t care, they’re avoiding it because they’re not sure where the lines are.
The Founder Bottleneck Problem
Founders typically carry deep institutional knowledge, strong client relationships, and a bias toward action. Early on, this is a strength. Over time, it can become a constraint.
When founders remain the default decision-maker or quality-control checkpoint, accountability subtly shifts upward. Team members may be capable, but they learn that responsibility ultimately stops with leadership.
At this stage, leadership must evolve:
- From solving problems to designing systems
- From approving decisions to setting standards
- From answering questions to clarifying roles and expectations
This shift is not about disengaging. It is about creating space for others to fully step into responsibility.
When I Realized I Was the Bottleneck
There was a point in my career when I started noticing a pattern that didn’t sit right with me. Decisions were coming to me that shouldn’t have needed to. Small issues were getting escalated. And team members I trusted (people I knew were very capable) seemed hesitant to act without checking in first.
At the time, I told myself this was just part of leadership. I was staying close. I was being responsive. I was making sure nothing slipped through the cracks. But the more I paid attention, the clearer it became that my involvement was creating the very problem I thought I was preventing.
I had become the default decision-maker, not because the team couldn’t decide, but because I hadn’t clearly defined where their responsibility ended and mine began. I was jumping in quickly, answering questions in real time, and solving problems before they had a chance to fully land with the people closest to the work.
From my perspective, I was being helpful. From theirs, I was unintentionally signaling that real accountability still sat with me.
The turning point came during a conversation with a strong team member who said, almost apologetically, “I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t overstepping.” That phrase stuck with me. Overstepping what, exactly? If someone is responsible for an outcome but worried about overstepping, something is off.
I realized that I had never clearly articulated which decisions they fully owned, which ones required collaboration, and which ones truly needed escalation. In the absence of clarity, the safest move was always to ask.
The shift wasn’t dramatic or instantaneous. It started with slowing myself down. Instead of answering immediately, I began asking, “What do you think we should do?” and “Is this a decision you feel comfortable making?” More importantly, I started explicitly naming decision authority and expectations—sometimes awkwardly, sometimes imperfectly.
Decisions started happening without me faster than I anticipated. Issues surfaced earlier. Team members sounded more confident, not less. And over time, I found myself pulled less into the weeds, not because I disengaged, but because responsibility had finally been distributed in a way that made sense.
The lesson was uncomfortable but lasting: accountability doesn’t grow when leaders stay closer. It grows when leaders make space and clearly define where responsibility truly lives.
Accountability Thrives on Consistency
One of the fastest ways to undermine accountability is inconsistency. When expectations change frequently, feedback is uneven, or consequences are applied selectively, people stop taking responsibility seriously. High performers disengage first.
Accountability systems that work are reliable:
- They focus on outcomes, not activity
- They are transparent, not negotiated privately
- They are applied consistently, regardless of role or tenure
When people trust the system, they are far more willing to step into responsibility.
Reinforcing Accountability Through Performance Systems
Culture is reinforced through structure. Performance management plays a central role.
In RIAs, accountability strengthens when perfomance systems align:
- Clear outcomes with meaningful indicators
- Feedback with learning and improvement
- Incentives with results individuals can directly influence
Importantly, accountability should not be reserved for senior leadership. Firms that delay meaningful responsibility until partnership often miss an opportunity to build depth earlier in the talent pipeline. Accountability is a muscle. It develops through use.
How You Know It’s Working
Leaders often ask how to assess whether accountability is truly embedded in the culture.
What to watch for:
- Do issues surface early or only when they become urgent?
- Do decisions continue in leadership’s absence?
- Do people proactively improve systems?
- Do peers hold one another to standards?
Accountability is most visible not when things go well, but when something breaks.
Final Thoughts
As RIAs grow, complexity is inevitable. Confusion is not.
A culture of accountability does not emerge by accident. It is built—through clarity, consistency, and leadership discipline. Firms that invest early in defining responsibilities, decision rights, and expectations find that growth becomes more sustainable and less dependent on leadership.
For advisory firms that compete on trust and consistency, accountability isn’t abstract. It’s a critical part of the firm’s infrastructure.
References
Charles Schwab & Co., Inc. 2023. RIA Benchmarking Study: Insights on Growth, Productivity, and Firm Management.
Gallup, Inc. 2023. State of the Global Workplace: Global Workplace Insights and Engagement Trends.