Our weekly customer onboarding time is lagging, but Sales blames Operations for slow setup, and Operations blames Sales for passing over incomplete client profiles. Since both departments impact this number, who should own it on our leadership Scorecard?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

In the EOS® model, there is no such thing as shared ownership. When two people own a number, nobody owns it, and the finger-pointing will continue. To resolve this conflict, you must look to your Accountability Chart and assign the metric to a single seat.

The seat that owns the metric is not responsible for doing all the work, but they are fully accountable for the final result and for reporting that number accurately on the Scorecard each week. For customer onboarding time, the Operations seat should own the metric because onboarding is fundamentally a delivery function.

If the onboarding time is slow because Sales is delivering incomplete profiles, it is the responsibility of the Operations leader to address this bottleneck. They must bring this issue to the weekly Level 10 Meeting™ and use the IDS® process to solve it with the Sales leader.

The Operations leader can set a clear boundary, refusing to accept incomplete handoffs from Sales, or they can work together to create a standardized handoff checklist. However, the metric itself remains on the Operations leader's portion of the Scorecard. This single-point accountability forces the owner of the seat to proactively solve cross-functional issues rather than using them as an excuse for poor performance.