Our Director of Operations gets and wants his seat, but he spends half his week doing frontline dispatching and fixing machine breakdowns instead of managing the department and leading his team. How do we use the Accountability Chart to break this habit and hold him accountable to true leadership roles?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

This happens when a promoted technician defaults to what is familiar and comfortable rather than doing the hard work of leadership. Frontline tasks like fixing a machine or dispatching crews provide instant gratification and a clear sense of accomplishment. Leading, managing, and holding people accountable (LMA) feels ambiguous, uncomfortable, and slow.

To break this habit, you must use the five roles on the Accountability Chart as an objective performance standard.

Review the Operations seat on your chart. The five roles should look like this:

- Leadership, Management, and Accountability (LMA)
- Process execution and continuous improvement
- Capacity planning and resource allocation
- Departmental Rocks and scorecard metrics
- Safety, quality, and scrap management

Notice that fixing broken machinery and manual dispatching are not on that list. If the Director of Operations is spending twenty hours a week on frontline labor, he is neglecting the five roles the company is paying him to execute.

In your next quarterly conversation, review his time allocation using Delegate and Elevate. Have him quantify how many hours he spends working in the business versus on the business. If dispatching and machine repair are pulling him down, those roles belong in seats below him on the chart. Direct him to train direct reports, hire frontline technicians, or build standard operating procedures to handle daily firefighting.

Make it clear: his job is not to be the hero who fixes the equipment. His job is to build a department that never depends on a hero to run smoothly.