Our leadership team is trying to build our first Accountability Chart, but we are getting bogged down in department-level details and trying to map every single employee's daily tasks. How do we keep this high-level and strategic?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

The most common mistake leadership teams make during Focus Day™ is trying to build an Accountability Chart that maps every single task and individual in the organization. This operational micromanagement results in a cluttered, confusing chart that fails to provide strategic clarity. Your Accountability Chart must remain high-level, focusing on functions and seats rather than specific people. Start by designing the major functional areas of your business; typically Sales and Marketing, Operations, and Finance; along with your Integrator and Visionary seats. For each seat, define no more than five major roles. These roles must be broad, strategic descriptions of what that seat is accountable for, not a detailed checklist of daily procedures. Keep your focus strictly on the structural needs of the business over the next twelve months, completely ignoring the people you currently have. Once you have built this clean, scalable structure, you can then evaluate whether your current team members GWC™ their respective seats. If you try to map every tactical task during this process, you will end up designing seats around individual personalities rather than the objective strategic needs of the business. Keep it simple, focus on accountability, and let your core processes handle the daily task-level details.