Accountability Chart Mastery (Part Two of Six). If your community bank, credit union, or non-banking business runs on the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS®) (or even if you don’t), the accountability chart is one of the most powerful tools to getting what you want from your business.

In part one of this series, we talked about what an accountability chart is and why it is important to have one. In part two, we address some stories with creating accountability charts.

An Accountability Back Story

While building an accountability chart, one of our clients ran into an issue with some of the service areas of the organization (this was an IT consulting firm). Two members of the senior leadership team ended up with part of the “reactive services” accountabilities. In IT consulting terms, reactive services is the Help Desk and the teams tasked with resolving computer issues as they came up. One leadership team member was over tiers 1 to 3 of the Help Desk and the other leadership team member was over tier 4 of the Help Desk. The staff reported to the proper LT members (org chart), but the accountability seat of “reactive services” was filled by two people.

It took a full six months of discussions and re-structuring to get this accountability back under one person. It was not easy, but everyone on the leadership team recognized the importance of resolving the issue. Now that the accountability is under one-person, reactive service response times are smaller and their clients are much happier.

When two are responsible for a single accountability, nobody is responsible for that accountability.

When Nobody is Accountable

Another situation which seems to keep coming up in many community banks and credit unions is that there are business functions which seem to get done, but that function is not documented and the senior leadership team either doesn’t realize the accountability exists or assumes it just naturally happens.

We see this most often with Customer Service and the Customer Experience. Customer service is part of the customer experience, so customer experience is something which needs to have a seat accountable for this critical business function. I could go on and on about what customer experience is, but for the purposes of this article, let’s say it is the experience your customer has with your organization from the marketing materials to your call center. Customer experience encompasses everything your customer sees, feels and experiences. If this critical area is not intentionally managed from an accountability standpoint, your customer experience will vary based on who or what the client is interacting with at that moment.

In part three of this series, we’ll talk about some of the building blocks of an accountability chart.

Resources:

• For more information about building a world-class customer service organization, read The Customer Service Revolution by John R. DiJulius.
• Download Gino Wickman’s free book called Decide.
• Contact Us for more information about building out the Accountability Chart for your community bank or credit union – we are here to help!