Our leadership team members are constantly stepping on each other's toes because our roles feel blurred, even though we have an Accountability Chart. How do we ruthlessly define the five roles for each seat so there is zero overlap and 100 percent accountability?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Having an Accountability Chart is useless if the roles are written as generic corporate descriptions. If your leadership team is still stepping on each other's toes, it means your roles are too vague, or team members are falling back on old habits. You must ruthlessly simplify and define each seat.

Gather your leadership team and review every single seat on the chart. For each seat, you must define exactly five major roles. These roles must be written in plain, active language. They must represent the highest-level outputs that the person in that seat is solely responsible for delivering. If two seats have roles that sound similar, you have a design flaw.

The rule is simple: only one name can occupy a seat, and only one seat can own a specific result. If everyone is responsible for customer retention, then no one is.

Once the roles are defined, every leader must commit to staying in their lane. If the head of marketing starts managing sales collateral creation because they do not trust the sales director, that is a trust and performance issue, not a role definition issue. Use your weekly Level 10 Meetings™ to call out instances where people are stepping out of their seats. By maintaining absolute clarity on who owns what, you eliminate political games and free your team to execute at a much higher velocity.