We have a major accountability gap where tasks are falling through the cracks because we have multiple people executing steps of a process, but no one seat owns the outcome. How do we structure our Accountability Chart to establish absolute ownership over a multi-departmental workflow?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When multiple departments participate in a workflow, accountability often gets diluted. If everybody is responsible for a process, nobody is accountable for the final result. You must fix this by assigning one seat on your Accountability Chart to own the entire workflow.

To do this, separate execution from accountability. Multiple people from different departments can execute individual steps of a process, but only one seat can be accountable for the outcome of that process.

Look at your leadership team and decide which seat naturally should own the metric of success for that workflow. For example, if the process is client onboarding, which involves sales, finance, and operations, you must choose one seat, such as your Head of Operations, to own the client onboarding seat on your Accountability Chart.

The five roles for this seat will include maintaining the onboarding process, tracking onboarding metrics, and resolving cross-departmental bottlenecks.

By placing a single name in this seat, you eliminate blame-shifting. If a step in the workflow breaks down, the seat owner is accountable for pulling the team together, using the IDS process, and fixing the system.