In late 2008, during a training session at WindTre, I watched a video by Julio Velasco, the legendary coach of the Italian national volleyball team. It was eight minutes long, and it changed how I think about accountability culture in leadership. I still refer to it today. If you have eight minutes, watch the video. It holds up.
The culture of excuses
Velasco built his coaching philosophy around fighting what he called la cultura degli alibi: the culture of excuses. The premise is simple. When something goes wrong, the instinct in most teams is to look outward. External conditions, bad luck, other people’s mistakes. In psychological terms, this is a classic external locus of control.
He opens with a story from his youth. Volleyball players, well trained on indoor courts, would lose matches on the beach and complain they couldn’t jump properly because the sand wasn’t like parquet. His response: “How strange that sand behaves like sand and not like a parquet floor. Either you learn to jump in the sand, or you don’t play on the sand.”
Simple. Almost brutal. But entirely correct.
The chain of blame in professional sports
Velasco then describes what he observed in professional volleyball. A hitter spikes the ball into the net and complains the pass wasn’t in the right spot. The setter blames the receiver. The receiver says the lights were blinding him. Velasco’s reaction: “Should we really call an electrician to fix the team’s performance?”
The chain of blame is self-reinforcing. Everyone has a valid-sounding excuse. Nobody actually improves.
What a good setter really looks like
The sharpest part of the video, for me, is his definition of a good setter. A good setter is not someone who delivers perfect plays when given perfect passes. A good setter is someone who can deliver even when the pass is bad.
That reframe matters in business just as much as in sport. In leadership, conditions are almost never ideal. Markets shift, budgets get cut, teams are understaffed, strategies change mid-year. The question is whether your people adapt and find a way, or whether they document why it wasn’t their fault.
How this changed my approach
After watching Velasco’s video, I started paying more attention to the language people use when things go wrong. The difference between a team with an accountability culture and one without shows up in small moments: how someone describes a missed target in a weekly review, how a manager explains a failed campaign, what gets said in a post-mortem.
Accountability does not mean ignoring real constraints. It means taking ownership of what you can control within those constraints, and focusing your energy there. If the sand behaves like sand, you learn to jump differently.
That’s the standard Velasco held his players to. It’s a reasonable standard for leadership teams too.
This post was originally published on LinkedIn.
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