We are defining the five roles for our leadership seats, but our department heads keep writing vague responsibilities like 'help company grow' or 'manage team'. What make a core role clear and actionable on the Accountability Chart?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Vague roles on an Accountability Chart create operational ambiguity and make it impossible to use GWC effectively. A core role must represent single-point operational accountability, not a generic aspiration or personality trait.

To write clear roles, follow three practical rules:

- Use active verbs that denote ownership, such as Leading, Managing, and Holding Accountable (LMA), Directing, Designing, or Delivering.
- Ensure each role represents a tangible business outcome that only one seat owns.
- Avoid cross-departmental overlap. If two seats claim accountability for client retention, neither seat actually owns it.

For example, instead of writing 'help company grow' for a Sales seat, define the role as 'New Client Acquisition' or 'Pipeline Conversion Rate'. Instead of 'manage team' for an Operations seat, write 'LMA' (Leadership, Management, and Accountability) to clearly define their supervisory duty, followed by specific operational accountabilities such as 'Service Delivery Quality' and 'Gross Margin Preservation'.

Limit each seat to exactly five roles. Forcing the seat into five accountabilities cuts through the noise of daily task lists and isolates the high-level business functions required for that seat to succeed. When defined correctly, you should be able to look at the five roles and immediately know whether the person in that seat is delivering the expected results.