Here is an article written by Steve Tobak for CBS MoneyWatch, the CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the website’s newsletters, please click here.

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(MoneyWatch) COMMENTARY President Obama’s “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that” speech hasn’t just created a firestorm of political debate. It’s got a lot of business people shaking their heads, as well. And that includes me.

While I understand what the president was trying to get at, the fundamental problem with his logic is that it flies in the face of one of the most important management concepts: accountability. When people are held accountable — to themselves and their stakeholders — things get done. Good things.

Actually, the speech does a pretty good job of explaining how accountability works, if you just reverse the cause and effect. You see, when people take risks and hold themselves accountable for the outcome, as our founding fathers did, that’s what built “this unbelievable American system,” to use the president’s words.

Granted, that system does now exist, but only through the continuous replication of the concept of personal initiative and accountability. It’s not the other way around. The founding fathers were entrepreneurs and innovators in every sense of the way we think of those words today. Had they not been, we wouldn’t have this great system.

President Obama was certainly right about one thing. There are a lot of smart and hardworking people out there. And one of the best ways I know of to differentiate and ensure successful outcomes in business is to create solid accountability mechanisms.

Here are [two of] the top five “accountability” pitfalls that business leaders and executives typically fall into, in my experience. Some of them don’t even appear to be accountability-related on the surface, which is why they’re so insidious. If you want a high-performance management team, make sure you avoid them:

Unclear responsibility. This is probably the most common pitfall. Show me an organization and I’ll show you managers with misaligned goals and vague responsibility. Two people shouldn’t have the same functional responsibility or own the same goal. If you do that, you’re asking for things to fall in the crack. That doesn’t preclude “matrix” management; the trick is to ensure goals and responsibilities are properly aligned. It can be done.

No follow up. This is practically an epidemic in organizations. Executives are great at coming up with goals, strategies, even metrics. Unfortunately, they’re also notoriously bad at following up. I don’t care how driven and entrepreneurial executives are; without follow up, nothing good happens. Companies must have a relatively objective and, sorry to say this, strict process for both setting and scoring management performance metrics.

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Not surprisingly, I find that executive management teams at consistently successful companies make accountability a priority and, therefore, avoid these pitfalls. It take a real commitment of precious management time and resources. But not only is the payoff worth it, it’s a necessity in our hypercompetitive business world.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Steve Tobak is a consultant and former high-tech senior executive. He’s managing partner of Invisor Consulting, a management consulting and business strategy firm. Contact Steve, follow him on Facebook, or connect on LinkedIn. To  check out other Tobak articles, please click here.