For companies running on The Entrepreneur Operating System (EOS), there is no more foundational element than the Accountability Chart. Central to the Focus Day agenda, The EOS Implementer facilitates a discussion to help the Leadership Team determine the key roles that must be fulfilled in order to achieve the business plan. These seats are built without names, and then people in the company are evaluated as to whether they fit the seats (GWC: Get it, Want it, have the Capacity to do it). Where the Leadership Team agrees a person fits the seat, their name is attached to the Accountability Chart. Where there is no one in the organization that GWCs the seat, the Leadership Team (LT) builds a plan to hire a person for the seat, train a person to grow into the seat, or develop a workaround plan to deliver the roles required. Sometimes that means a person is sitting in two seats, or perhaps the roles are outsourced depending on the budget.
That is how it is supposed to work.
As with many things involved in running a business, the reality is often messier than the plan. The biggest challenge I’ve found in my experience working with fifteen different organizations over the last four years is where the Visionary doesn’t want to enact consequences for accountabilities not achieved.
I know why this is the case.
The companies that work with Fractional Integrators are of a certain size and maturity, and generally can’t afford a full-time Integrator. My job as an external Fractional Integrator is to help Visionaries grow the business to the point where they can afford a full-time Integrator, or build out the processes so they can in-house the solution, giving the seat to someone on the Leadership Team who does GWC the role. All my assignments are businesses in transition. The company has hit the ceiling on growth and needs to add discipline to continue growth or turn around problems.
The thing about companies in transition is that there are always people who don’t fit. The people were good before, when the company was smaller, and everyone wore multiple hats; they have been there since the beginning, and it feels like family. Most small and medium-sized businesses have multiple people in roles that don’t quite fit and can’t grow with the role and accountabilities. My experience with Visionaries has been that they value relationships and longevity, and find it very difficult to hold people accountable.
This is how it plays out in reality. Processes are developed to work around the limitations of employees. Sub-par results are accepted because the effort of replacing the person, often at an increased salary, is too much trouble with all the other things going on. Who is going to take on the role while a new person gets trained? What are other employees going to think about the company when the person who used to do the role is removed?
The irony is that it is the Visionary who is not holding themselves accountable. They are one who accept employee performance when they know that it is what is getting in the way of progress. They value loyalty because these people have been here for a long time, and have intertwined the personal relationship with the professional relationship. But they don’t accept that the company’s changing requirements mean that roles need to change, and holding themselves accountable means that some of those people won’t be able to grow where the role needs to go.
This affects the Integrator because we are the ones who are supposed to hold the Leadership Team accountable. Often in the first conversation I have with the Visionary, they say they aren’t making their numbers, the scorecard is off-track week in and week out, Rocks are not getting done, and no one is holding the LT accountable. But accountability starts at the top, and if the Visionary isn’t holding themselves accountable, then why would they expect anyone else to be accountable? If we can’t hold the Visionary accountable, then how can we be accountable for our role?
Again, reality is messy. Companies are about people, and in small and medium-sized companies, they do behave more like families than organizations. That is good! People want to work where they are valued, where they make a difference, where they like the people they work with. But the reality is that “what got you here, won’t get you where you want to go.”
The first step to the Visionary getting what they want is to understand what is not working, and why, and make a plan to fix it. Can we train someone up, can we find a better role for them, can we support them in a different way to make them more successful? But if the answer comes back no, then we need to choose to make the decision to move past them. Or we choose to accept the results we are currently getting. It is a choice. And not choosing is also a choice.
Which leads to consequence. Accountability is about achieving results. There can be no accountability without consequence. If the scorecard is red, and Rocks are not getting done, is the Visionary holding themselves accountable to making the changes necessary?
I often say that you can’t blow up all the parts of your business on the same day, even though I know the Visionary sometimes wants to just that. But what we can do is look at the part of the business that is most challenging, accept that the other parts will stay as is for a while, and make the first change. It will take more time and effort than we want, but the first change helps us get to the next one. And over time, accountability goes up, results start being achieved, and progress starts to happen.
The Integrator can’t be accountable if the Visionary is not willing to be accountable. It starts at the top.