Our newly designed Accountability Chart has five roles listed under each seat, but our managers are confused about the difference between a day-to-day task and a core role. How do we write clean roles for our seats without creating fifty-page job descriptions?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

The purpose of the Accountability Chart is to define who owns what, not to outline every minor task or process. When writing roles for a seat, you must limit them to five high-level, major responsibilities. If you start adding detailed daily tasks, you will end up with a fifty-page HR manual that nobody reads or respects.

Each role must be a clear, observable area of accountability. For example, instead of writing "input leads into CRM daily, check email three times a day, and run weekly pipeline reports," you would write "CRM data integrity." That single role encompasses all those daily tasks.

If your managers are struggling to separate tasks from roles, have them ask this question during their next thinking time session: what is the ultimate outcome we are paying this seat to deliver? The answer to that question is your role. The specific steps they take to achieve that outcome belong in your documented standard operating procedures, not on the Accountability Chart. Keep your chart simple, clean, and focused on high-level accountability.