It’s a seemingly simple concept but often falls down when people don’t want to deliver what you are expecting. It’s a surprisingly common issue. Maybe you are asking people to put in more work than they want or you are asking them to do something they don’t know how to do or they simply don’t agree that it is work worth doing. There is any number of reasons that people choose to not deliver.
One of the hardest lessons I learned in my career is that you aren’t going to be liked by everyone. Holding people accountable is a quick way to not being liked. But it also establishes a precedent for how work should be done. And if people aren’t going to like you because you ask them to do what they are supposed to, they weren’t going to like you anyway.