Our leadership team keeps trying to add every minor task and daily checklist item to the roles listed under our Accountability Chart seats. Now our chart is a giant, complicated document that is impossible to read. How do we keep our Accountability Chart focused on high-level outcomes instead of daily to-do lists?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Your Accountability Chart is designed to define structure and seats, not to act as a daily task manager or a standard operating procedure document. When you allow your chart to become bloated with minor tasks, you dilute the focus of your seats and make it incredibly difficult to manage performance.

Each seat on your Accountability Chart should have no more than five major roles. These roles must be high-level, outcome-oriented accountabilities that define the core purpose of the seat. If you have ten or fifteen bullet points under a seat, you are doing it wrong.

To clean up your chart and keep it high-level, use these steps:

- Audit your current seats. Review the list of roles and ask whether each item is a major area of accountability or simply a task. If it is a task, remove it.

- Move daily checklists and tasks to your documented processes or standard operating procedures. The Accountability Chart tells you who is responsible for the outcome, while your processes tell you how to do the work.

- Focus on the key results. For example, instead of listing write daily social media posts and monitor ad comments, the role under your Marketing seat should simply be lead generation and brand awareness.

Keeping your Accountability Chart clean and focused on high-level outcomes ensures that your leadership team can quickly spot issues, make Right Seat decisions, and keep the business moving forward toward a clean exit.