Our leadership team is writing fifteen to twenty detailed roles for each seat on our Accountability Chart, turning the chart into a massive set of job descriptions. How do we keep our roles high-level and focused on pure accountability?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

An Accountability Chart is not a collection of job descriptions. If you have fifteen or twenty roles listed for a single seat, you have missed the point of the tool and created an unusable mess. The purpose of the Accountability Chart is to define the five major outcomes that a seat is responsible for delivering. These roles must be high level, clear, and conceptual. They should define what the seat owns, not how they do it. To fix this, challenge your leadership team to distill every seat down to exactly five roles. If you cannot describe a seat's primary accountability in five bullet points, you either do not understand the seat, or you are trying to cram multiple seats into one. Look at the list of fifteen roles and group them into broader categories. For example, instead of listing ten different administrative tasks, group them under a single role like managing office administration and facilities. By keeping the roles to exactly five, you make it easy for everyone in the company to understand who is accountable for what. This clarity makes your weekly Level 10 Meetings™ and daily decision making significantly faster and more effective.