Next Level Accountability Chart

Foreign. So as you're building out your accountability chart, I want to share not only some best practices, but also some observations on where we often see people go off track, which delays how soon we're able to get a really good accountability chart done and communicate it out to people to create really good alignment with expectations. So I want to make sure you start by going back and reviewing the definitions in your basecamp field guide of mission most critical outcome and obsessions and really make sure those are clear. And as you're building it out, be sure you follow the examples or use the examples as a guide that are in the field guide. We've laid out three different examples from three different types of industries. So you can begin to see what things stay the same across industries and are very much industry agnostic. And, and what are some things that nuance and change and what might that look like from one industry to the next? There are a few areas where people tend to go off track and where I see this happen most often is the mission in the accountability chart gets really, really long. Oftentimes there's still one sentence, but they're more like a paragraph that never of a sentence that never ends. So really try to be as succinct as possible. You still want to create clarity, but oftentimes I find if the mission feels like it's too long, you're probably not at a high enough altitude in terms of how you're viewing the mission. So try to kind of zoom out a little bit more and see if you can go higher level and a little bit more succinct. It should be very clear and they're often very, very obvious as I think you'll see from the examples. But it needs to be something that an individual in the seat can remember and if we make it too long, it's just very hard for them to remember and stay focused on. The second is a most critical outcome is just that. It's singular and it's measurable and it's time bound and it's typically binary. It's either at or above the goal or it's not. So you want to get to something measurable. It's often numeric. At a leadership level, it almost always ties to a line item on the financial statements. The deeper you go in the organization, it's much more about some sort of an outcome that the person is there to produce. The most critical outcome really answers two questions. First, it answers the question of if someone is successful in achieving their mission, what would you measure in order to prove that if somebody were to challenge you, the single most critical thing you could measure to prove success in a mission. But also from a return on investment perspective, in most companies, their fully burdened human capital cost is one of the largest expenses in the company. Where most companies, when they make an investment, they can look at that investment in terms of return on investment or roi. Oftentimes we can't answer those questions when we talk about people who we're going to put in certain roles. So another way to look at most critical outcome is for any individual in a seat. If you were going to be challenged by somebody to prove that the company is getting a return on investment for the individual that you're paying, paying to be in that seat, what would you measure as an outcome to justify that? The fully burdened cost of that individual is the right investment to make because of the return that we're getting as evidenced through our most critical outcome. So sometimes that can be helpful to think about it that way. The other thing you'll find is that most critical outcomes cascade through the organization. So for example, a director of operations might have a most critical outcome of net operating income dollars to budget. They might have, I'm going to use an example of a restaurant company, the general manager of each of the locations that the restaurant company has, they might have a most critical outcome that is their, their branch or their location's net operating income dollars to budget. And so if all of the general managers achieve their most critical outcome and hit their budgets, then the director of operations or the COO is going to hit theirs. And so that's one way to allow these things to cascade down into the organization. The, the third area where people tend to go off track is too many obsessions. And so we say in the field guide, it's typically between two and six obsessions. And what I tend to find is that at leadership levels we often have four, five, maybe six. But as we go deeper in the organization, that number goes down. And so as an example of this, if you look at the home services company, we could look at a director of operations who might have one of their obsessions to be own the operations processes, execution and outcomes. We might also want them to own quality control and compliance, own the customer experience and retention, meet or exceed their operations goals and metrics. They also have, and I think this should always be the first obsession for anyone with direct reports, an obsession to lead, manage, retain and hold my team accountable. So in that case, this director of operations has five obsessions. They may have a project manager reporting to them, who in this case also has five, they have direct reports. So they also need to lead, manage, retain, and hold their team accountable. But instead of owning the operations, processes, execution and outcomes, which is the Director of Operations, as it pertains to our process playbooks, this role might drive the operations, processes, execution and outcomes. So the difference of the verb changing from own to drive is that if there's a problem with our processes, they're not getting us the outcomes we want. We expect the Director of Operations to go in and fix those processes, make necessary changes, train people on the changes, and validate that those changes are now getting us the results we want. It's what we're paying them for. It's part of them doing their job. The project manager, however, they're in the weeds. They see what's going wrong with processes. If we have issues with our processes, but we don't want them to make the changes, we want them to bring that to the Director of Operations because their obsession should be to drive those playbooks. And so they're really driving accountability for their direct reports to follow the playbooks, which is actually one of the, in this case, a field technician's, one of their obsessions. So they're driving compliance with our processes, they're driving the training. But they're also, when they see issues arise because processes are broken or have gaps, they're collaborating with the person they report to as the Director of Operations to get those solved. So as I just mentioned, as you come down to a field technician, in this case, the field technician only has three obsessions. So we've gone from five at a leadership team level, five at mid manager now, to three at the front line. But this field technician, we want them to follow the operations process playbooks. We, we want them to follow the quality control and safety guidelines, and we want them to meet or exceed their goals and metrics. That's easy for a field technician to remember, and it focuses them on following our processes, following our standards, and meeting or exceeding my goals, my metrics, whatever I'm being measured by. If a field technician in this home services company will show up every day and obsess about those three things, they will be successful in their role. So that's the idea of how the most critical outcomes and the obsessions cascade down through an organization. One thing that I think is very critical to have a great accountability chart is that every seat in the company has one obsession that clearly defines how they interact with our process playbooks, because we really want to systemize the business so we've got to make it clear. For every role, do they own a process? Do they drive a process? Do they follow a process? Nine out of 10 times, one of those three verbs will be the appropriate verb. You may have situations where there's something different, but we find almost always that satisfies it. And that can apply to every single seat in the organization. So when we do that, we're creating more discipline and accountability around making sure we have great process playbooks they're being trained on. People understand them. People know that every day they need to focus on following those process playbooks. So that's everything on accountability chart. As always, please reach out to your guide if you're challenged or if you're stuck. Sometimes you'll find a role where a most critical outcome is very difficult to come up with and use your guide as a resource to help with that. We see lots of different examples of this. We have a whole community of guides. So if I'm your guide and I don't have an answer, I've got several other guides I can reach out to and tap into to see what. What they've come across and get their help in finding that. So we're here to help you. Please reach out and bring us in wherever you need to. That's. That's part of the investment that you're making, and we want to be, as we say, roped in with you on this journey. This is one of the ways that we can do that.