Bill Gallagher shares why a 75-person company's COO was drowning: employees asked her to solve problems instead of owning outcomes. He recommends three tools: a FACE chart to assign functional owners, a process-accountability chart for cross-functional work like quote-to-cash, and a Love/Loathe exercise to reassign or eliminate tasks.
Hey there. Do you have trouble letting go? Do you have lots of helpers but you're still overworked? I've got some ideas for you. Hi there. I'm Bill Gallagher, Scaling coach, host of the Scaling Up Business podcast. We've got interviews and tips and deep dives with entrepreneurs on our Getting Real series. Also, the deep conversations with the gurus, authors and experts in the world of scaling up. And then these short tips every week@scalingcoach.com or wherever you get your podcasts and video content, that kind of thing. So go look for that under Scaling Up Business or look for us@scalingcoach.com so I'm working with this company. It's been a few years now, but I remember very clearly that There were about 75 people on the team. And I was in a meeting with the senior team. And this new COO trying to get her hands around running this business is just lead ragged, like, just exhausted every day. And what was going on is that people just kept coming to her to ask questions. She just was solving people's problems and answering people's questions all day long every day. And people didn't seem to be able to do anything on their own. And yet I look around the room and I'm like, these are plenty of bright people. What happened was, is they hadn't given things away. So there were lots of people who worked on things, who were responsible for things, but not actually accountable for things. So in our world, there's a couple of different tools that can make a real difference in this thing. I'll tell you about three of them right up. The first one is what we call the face tool or functional accountability Chart Exercise. The face tool is our tool to help identify the common functions that every company really needs to address and and assign people clearly accountable for them and pick some metrics. The next one is process accountability Chart Exercise. And under process accountability, we're looking at what are the processes, the core process for the company that span or connect different functions like quote to cash. Right where we begin at the end of the marketing process or in the middle of the sales process, go all the way through performance, delivery, invoicing and collection. That would be quote to Cash. Lots of different departments getting touched there. Having one czar or owner for that can make a real difference. And starting to map that as a process. Then the third tool that I'll give you in this one is Love Loathe. If you'll just start making a list of all the things that you do every day and every week and you have your team make the same kind of list and put them either in the category of things they love doing or hate doing. Doesn't really matter what goes in what category. Later you look at them together and you realize this one hates doing that, but that one loves that, and that one hates that, but this one loves that. Like back and forth. And you can start to trade things up. You can also automate, delegate, get things, get rid of things, and so on. So that is the point of love loathe exercise. If we look at functional accountability and process accountability and love loathe, we can actually start to give things away. And you could stop working so hard. It's as simple as that. Not easy to do. Simple, but not easy. So there you go. Hope that's helpful for you. Dig into it. You'll find the downloads to the tools I talked about in the show notes and so on. My name is Bill Gallagher, Scaling Coach, host of the Scaling Up Business podcast. Find us each week@scalingcoach.com thanks. We'll talk to you again soon.
