We have metrics on our Scorecard that sit at the intersection of sales and operations, and my team wants to share ownership of them. Why is shared ownership a trap, and how do we assign a single owner using the Accountability Chart?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Shared ownership of a scorecard metric is a recipe for finger-pointing and operational drift. When two people are responsible for a single number, nobody is responsible. Your Scorecard must reflect the absolute clarity of your Accountability Chart, where every seat has one, and only one, owner.

If a metric sits at the intersection of two departments, you must look at who has the ultimate authority to impact the activity. Take a metric like onboarding transition time. Sales closes the deal, and operations delivers the work. If transition time is lagging, who owns it? The answer is found by looking at your Accountability Chart and defining where the handoff occurs.

If the bottleneck is the completeness of the sales handoff documents, then the sales seat owns the metric of handoff compliance. If the bottleneck is the scheduling of the kickoff meeting, then the operations seat owns the metric of time to first meeting.

Break the complex, shared metric down into its component parts until you can assign each part to a single seat. The person who owns the number must GWC™ the role. They must get it, want it, and have the capacity to do it. They do not have to do all the manual work to achieve the target, but they are the single point of accountability who must stand up during the Level 10 Meeting™ and explain why the number is red and how they plan to fix it.