We have a metric on our Scorecard for customer retention rate that both our Sales Director and our Operations Director claim they must own because sales sets the expectations and operations delivers the service. How do we resolve this joint-ownership conflict and assign a single seat on our Accountability Chart?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When two department heads claim they must own the same weekly Scorecard metric, you have a design flaw on your Accountability Chart. In the EOS® framework, there is no such thing as joint ownership. If two people own a number, nobody owns it.

To resolve this conflict, you must look at who has final authority and control over the actual activity that drives the metric. In your case, while sales sets customer expectations, the operations team is the seat that actually delivers the service and maintains the daily client relationship. Therefore, the Operations Director must own the customer retention metric on the leadership Scorecard.

This does not mean the Sales Director is off the hook. If the sales team is bringing in bad-fit clients who are destined to benchmark, the Operations Director will constantly miss their retention target. This is an issue that must be brought to the Level 10 Meeting™ and solved using IDS®.

The Operations Director will then work with the Sales Director to establish an upstream leading indicator for the sales team, such as the percentage of closed deals that meet your ideal client profile.

Every metric on your Scorecard must reside in a single seat on your Accountability Chart. Identify who has the ultimate operational control to move that number, assign it to their seat, and use your weekly meetings to address the cross-departmental bottlenecks that affect the outcome.