EOS® tutorial: how to design your company Accountability Chart

The Accountability Chart is one of my favorite EOS® tools. This is a step by step tutorial to help you implement it in your company

We’ve all been there: a pending task is never done because two team members think the other will deal with it. A decision brings tension between two team members who think they are both accountable for the topic. A person is playing three different roles and nobody (not even the person) realizes it.

All of these problems and more, can be solved by the Accountability Chart and this article will cover some theory and practice to put it into practice.

In case you don’t know what EOS is

Before continuing to the tutorial, I want to briefly mention that EOS is a complete methodology to run companies. If you are interested in learning more, you can find the rest of the articles I wrote in the EOS collection.

The EOS Process

Typical organizational problems that can be avoided

If you have ever run a company, you are familiar with these situations:

• Hiring the wrong person: When we haven’t gone through the exercise of thinking exactly what a role will be accountable for, we will create an inaccurate job description and invest time in recruiting, hiring and onboarding the wrong person. Once we discover the person is not right for the role (aka GWC, more below) we’ll have to go back to square one.
• The orphan function: A function is not done by anyone, because several team members think some other person is accountable. As it’s not explicitly called out, then no one is accountable.
• Multiple hats: A person is playing several roles usually with mediocre performance, not because of a capability issue, but because we humans need to focus and eliminate context switch as much as possible.
• Tension between decision makers: Two or more team members think they are accountable for something. Therefore when it comes the moment of making a decision, they both want to impose theirs. This produces friction, tension and fighting. Guess what? The drama can be avoided.

What’s the difference between the Accountability Chart and the Organizational Chart

The organizational chart basically just tells you the reporting structure. Most charts just have a name and their associated title in each box. And they tend not to be very helpful. For example, I have no idea exactly what a “Vice President for Strategies and Special Projects” does. I assume they must be special, since their title says so. But what are they responsible for?

On the other hand, an Accountability Chart tells a nice little story about a company. Sure, they list the name and title, but they also explain who owns what business functions. The most basic structure usually has a Visionary, an Integrator, and then heads of Finance, Operations, Sales and Marketing. Each of those leaders has very specific items attached to their name with only one owner per function. Why? Because when everyone has responsibility for something, no one has responsibility for it.

Tutorial: How to build your Accountability Chart

Recommended tool to brainstorm the chart: the board

Nothing is better for a creative session with a team, than having everyone in the same room in front of a board. If you and your team see each other frequently or if you are back at the office, then this will be easy to do.

But chances are, you are doing this exercise within a remote company. If this is the case, I encourage you to schedule a day to meet in person and do this session together.

Recommended tool to document the chart: Google Drawings

In case you haven’t used it before, here is a short tutorial to use it:

Step 1 — Prepare the session with the management

Make sure you explain what the objectives of the Accountability Chart is and what problems we’ll avoid by having one.

I haven’t done this exercise remotely, but I suspect it would take double the time and a lower quality output. If possible, make sure you are all together in the same physical space when doing it, especially if it’s your first time doing it.

Last recommendation: gather around a board and schedule three hours for this session.

Step 2 — Show a real example

It helps everyone to understand what an Accountability Chart looks like, and the differences with a regular Organizational chart.

You can just use this example as the desired out to align everyone:

A complete Accountability Chart example

Step 3 — Start building it in the board

Before you start to design the chart, it’s very important to follow these simple rules and make sure everyone understands them as well:

1. Forget about who is currently sitting in what seat — no one has a seat, including you. Focus on roles. We’ll assign people later to the roles.
2. If issues arise, have someone help you write them in a shared issues list

Every company has some big common characteristics:

• They follow a Vision (Visionary box)
• They offer a service or product (Operations box)
• They have to acquire clients (Sales & Marketing box)
• They have to handle money: charge clients & pay bills (Finance box)
• All of the above have to be well coordinated (Integrator box)

With this in mind, think forward 6 to 9 months about what your company would optimally look like if you were able to design it now from scratch. What are the major functions of your ideal business, the major things you will need to do well to be the business you want to be? Draw a separate box/seat for each of your major functions:

The basic Accountability Chart

Step 4 — Fill up to five functions for which each box is accountable

• For each box/seat, list the major things you expect the person to be responsible for when they take the seat. Do this in bullet point format, condensing your expectations to plus or minus five clear bullets per seat.
• Place one and only one person in each of these key leadership seats, being sure the person absolutely shares your core values (right person) and absolutely get’s it, wants it and has the capacity to do what the seat requires. Again, only one leader in each seat because, if two people are in charge, no one is in charge.
• Above that horizontal row of leadership seats, draw one additional seat for the one person who will be responsible for overseeing and integrating all these major functions to assure that they operate harmoniously.
• From there, have each leader repeat the exercise for their respective functional part of the organization, creating only the essential seats, defining the responsibilities for each seat and filling the seats with right people who GWC.

Here is a base chart with the typical functions included in these main roles:

The basic Accountability chart with the core roles and functions

Step 5 — Grow the chart below Sales, Operations and Finance

Once you reach this point, the next step is to continue growing the chart below Sales, Operations and Finance.

Remember: focus only on the main three to five responsibilities for each role and forget whatever roles (and names) the company currently has in place.

Step 6 — GWC: Gets it, Wants it, Capacity

Once you define the right seats, you can then get the right people into those seats. Keep in mind there is a difference between finding a different seat for someone who is the right person but not in the right seat versus creating a seat for someone because you:

1. don’t want to hurt their feelings
2. don’t want to make a tough decision, or
3. make an excuse for keeping the wrong person around.

The people decisions are always the most difficult to make in any company. Remember, you are the leader of your company. If you don’t make the tough decisions, who will?

GWC stands for “Gets it”, “Wants it” and “Capacity to play the role”.

• People who “Get” their seat truly understand why the position exists in the company and how they contribute to the company’s vision. They grasp it, understand it, and live it.
• People who “Want” their seat are excited to achieve the responsibilities each day. They look forward to coming to work, and have the desire to do the job.
• People who have the “Capacity” have the God-given talents, skills, education, and any other requirements needed to fill the seat.

For each role in the Accountability Chart:

1. Each manager must nominate their favorite candidate to play the role
2. For the name that gets the most votes, each manager must verbalize if they think the person has G, W and C for the role.
3. What I think is very intersting of this exercise, is that you get to hear each manager saying publicly what they think of others for this particular role, even for yourself. This requires humility and openness from everyone.

Final thoughts

I hope this short tutorial gets many teams to try and do their first Accountability Chart.

If you are interested in learning more about EOS, you can find the rest of the articles I wrote in the EOS collection.

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