Accountability Chart Mastery (Part Five 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 addressed some stories with creating accountability charts. In part three, we started reviewing some building blocks of an accountability chart. In part four of this series, we addressed building out the senior leadership team level of your accountability chart. In part five of this series, we address building an accountability chart for a department of a company not running on EOS.

What if your company is not using EOS, but want to enhance your workgroup’s performance?

It is possible to use the accountability chart to organize a department. Here are some ideas on how you could do it.

Start out by listing out all the accountabilities you know your area is responsible for. If you are part of an easily identifiable part of the organization (IT or Accounting), the accountability list is generally easy to come up with. It is entirely possible that you come up with some functions another workgroup or department is responsible for – just set them aside for now, listing only what your team does.

Now that you have a list of the accountabilities, divide them up into functional positions. For instance, if you were doing the accounting department, you may have an account payable, accounts receivable and account reconciliation functional positions. Your goal here is to build a position where the person assigned to the position has about 40 hours of work per week.

Finally, place each team member into one of the functional positions – evaluating if the person gets it, wants it and has the capacity to do it. We call that GWC® in the EOS world.

What to do with the accountabilities other departments handle? Not a problem, just list them on your accountability chart so the team knows who is responsible for that accountability.

Now that you have an accountability chart for your department, meet with the team (first individually, then as a group) to talk through the accountability chart and agree on it. You may have to adjust a few items on your team’s job descriptions (which usually involves HR) and then integrate these into regular performance reviews of each team member.

In part six of this series, we’ll go through some ideas for IT department accountabilities in a typical community bank or credit union and get you closer to accountability chart mastery.

Resources:

• Download the how to be a great boss toolkit
• Download the EOS tools
• More on GWC
• Contact Us for more information about building out the Accountability Chart for your community bank or credit union – we are here to help!