What are your functions and who's accountable?

One of the first things I do with a new client is I ask the leadership team two simple questions: 1) what are the key functions in your organization, and 2) who's accountable for each one of those functions? Sounds incredibly simple, but it is always the most important exercise I do with leadership teams when I first start working with them.

So let's talk about what it means:

Number one: What are the functions within your organization? I'm not talking about titles. It's not CEO, it's not VP of Sales and Marketing. What are the functions? It typically starts with head of company as a function. Sales, marketing, finance, of course, those are functions. Is customer success a function? Or is that something spread amongst the other functions? Is human resources a function, or is it about talent development? Is recruiting a function unto itself? Is research and development a function? What are the 8, 10 or 12 key functions within your organization? Very often when I have a leadership team list out those functions, there's incredible misalignment as to what those functions are. So it's really important that number one, we get that straight. So, what are your 8 to 12 key functions?

Number two: Who is accountable for each one of those functions? Let me be clear - when I say accountable, that's different than responsible. Responsible could be one person, it could be a thousand people. It might be very logical and very accurate for me to say to a team, you are all responsible for giving your clients wow levels of service, because responsibility is about who's rolling up their sleeves and getting the job done. That may be one person, again, it may be a thousand. But accountability is different. Accountability is about ownership. You may all be responsible for giving your clients wow levels of service, but who actually owns making the decisions, coming up with this strategy, and measuring whether you're achieving it? That can't be a thousand people. Accountability is always one and only one person. So very often after we list those 8, 10, or 12 functions and we get to who's accountable, we start with head of company. And especially in a partnership, that may be where we hit our first problem. Who's accountable as head of company? Well, it's the two partners. If more than one person is accountable, no one is accountable. So who's accountable for each function? And very often, when I go through each function, there may be 80% of those functions where it's very clear who owns marketing, who owns sales, who owns talent development, who owns IT. But there are three different issues, really important issues or opportunities that come up when we look at functional accountability:

1.    There may be functions where no one is accountable. Maybe customer success is a function and everybody is responsible, but no one's accountable. Maybe our research and development is a function, but no one's truly accountable for that one. And by the way, if no one's accountable, that typically goes up to head of company being accountable, which may or may not be okay.

2.    You may have multiple people accountable. I gave you one example. If there's two partners who both think they're head of company, that's a challenge. The other place I normally see multiple people accountable is if you've got regional heads of sales, and I say who's accountable for the sales function? Oh, that's these three people. Again, accountability is always one and only one person.

3.    Someone is accountable for so many functions that they're stretched way too thin. Now, certainly it's okay, it's more than okay for one person to be accountable for multiple functions. The question is, are they stretched too thin? If the head of company is also accountable for sales, customer success and finance, that head of company may be stretched too thin. If your head of the sales function, if whoever is accountable for sales is also accountable for marketing, and sales has become a 20 person organization, it may be that that's too much on that head of sales to also be accountable for marketing. The answers to that question on who's stretched too thin are absolutely going to change as you scale your organization. But that's when you need to be honest with each other as a leadership team, and not just try to create a bigger and bigger kingdom for yourself. So you need to be open and honest when you're stretched too thin, and there's a major function that may need to be either delegated to someone else, or you may need to hire someone new to head up that function.

Now, just because you have a function with no one accountable, just because you have a function with multiple people accountable, just because someone is stretched too thin, do you need to solve those issues today? Maybe, maybe not. That's for you and your leadership team to decide.

You may have a function like research and development with no one accountable, but that's okay because you're not developing a bunch of new products and services over the next 6, 9, 12 months. So it's okay that there's no one accountable. You may have someone stretched too thin, but there's a way to deal with that in the short term, and maybe you don't need to fix that for another 9 or 12 months. So all of these challenges you find with your functional accountability, you need to prioritize.

The next step is understanding that for each of those functions, how do you measure the success of that function? Just because you say Joe is accountable for marketing, do we really know what that accountability means if we don't know how we're measuring the success of marketing? Is marketing about creating a brand new website or having a beautiful logo or creating some great digital marketing campaign? Or is it about a goal number of marketing qualified leads every week?

When will you review functional accountability on your team? I suggest you do it as a group, as opposed to the CEO sitting down and figuring it out by his or herself. Because when you do it as a group, you start to understand whether there's misalignment between folks within the organization. I know this exercise almost sounds so simple, you may not think you need to do it - but you do.