Executing Your Vision Through Discipline and Accountability

BY MIKE ZAPPONE

Toquote Inventor Thomas Edison, “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.”

If you are looking for motivation, this is not the right place for you. We are going to talk about how to get things done in the real world.

I have not witnessed an industry with harder-working people than chauffeured transportation. This is a labor-intensive business, and labor is our number one expense (and often our biggest source of frustration). In our world, a superstar is someone who can see beyond the task in front of them. Unfortunately, this is the exception to the rule, as most team members will be given a task, return a result, then wait for the next one. So how do we turn them into superstars? We need to spell it out so there are no questions. If the definition of superstar exists only in your head, then your team will not be able to read it. Think about the commonly used phrase: “Do you see what I am saying?” How can we see what we are hearing? That is the goal; we need our team to be able to picture in their mind’s eye the words we are saying.

Define the Scope of Responsibilities
When I meet people in our industry, I ask them what their responsibilities are. The most common answer is “everything,” and that is the root cause of the problem. Author Patrick Lencioni says it best: “If everything is important, then nothing is important.” We need to create focus for our team by providing three to five clearly defined responsibilities for each seat, not thirty-five. When we do this, we craft an easy way to lead, manage, and hold people accountable for their seat and the roles we have defined specific for them.

Create an Accountability Chart
When working with my Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) clients, we cover this in something we call the accountability chart. While it is true that being able to assign a role to one person is ideal, it often requires a larger staff. However, it is not impossible to accomplish the same accountability with a smaller team. Infact, creating an accountability chart without enough people highlights the need for your next position. The person handling two or more roles still has ultimate responsibility for the measurables in those roles.

This is not one-size-fits-all scenario; a company that performs 25 trips per day will have a different accountability chart than one doing 100 or 2,500 trips per day. With the lower trip counts, it is feasible for a dispatcher to also have the role of taking reservations or even closing out trips. As the number of runs increases, the need for specialized labor is much greater.

The challenge in our industry is that we are evolving, and evolution does not always create the most efficient result. The Colorado River cut its way through the Grand Canyon, creating one of the wonders of the world. A straight line is the shortest path between two points. As your company grows, you will need to revisit your accountability chart to accommodate for the next 12 months of growth. It’s so important that we revisit the accountability chart every year with my EOS clients during our annual planning session.

Here is what it looks like:

Define the essential seats (jobs) necessary to operate your company. Almost every company will need the following three roles to start:
1. Marketing/sales seat: Generates interest in your business and converts that interest into customers.
2. Operations seat(s): Makes the product, delivers the service, or both.
3. Accounting seat: Manages the assets and tracks income and expenses.

Continue to build on this foundation by defining the seats needed to run your business, clarifying the roles for each seat.

Once you have identified all the leadership seats, we need to define if there is an integrator and a visionary. The integrator is the person responsible for making sure the major components have everything they need to be successful. They essentially act as the conductor, keeping the tempo and consistency of our business. The visionary is the person who guides the company and sets the long-term goals. When a visionary sits in the integrator seat, you often see a lot of spikes in activity but not a lot of completion. It is critical to describe the roles for each of these seats to get what EOS calls the recipe for rocket fuel.

We have discussed the top of the company, but what about the front line or outside vendors? If they are a functional part of your company, they should have a seat and defined roles that belong in that seat.

Define the Meaning of Success With Measurables What gets measured gets improved. My favorite example of this is Charles Schwab, who turned an underperforming steel mill at Bethlehem Steel into his top-performing mill. Schwab asked the day shift how many heats they did that day. The answer was six, and he wrote it on the plant floor in chalk. When the night shift came in, they asked for an explanation behind this number on the floor. The next morning, a big seven was written on the floor. This competition and measurement made Bethlehem Steel the top-performing mill in Schwab’s portfolio.

We need to define a measurable for each role in our company. How many rings until the phone is answered? What percentage of on-time pickups do we achieve? How many requests for out-of-market reservations do we handle? Whatever we want to improve, we need to establish a goal and measure it. Every seat should have a benchmark.

If you ask a staff member if they are doing a good job, the answer is most likely “yes.” Based on what? The same applies to their manager—if you were asked whether that employee is doing a good job, how would you answer? Based on what? Create clear measurables that define success for each seat in your organization. That way, both the team member and their manager will know, without a doubt, whether they are meeting expectations.

Assign Action Items from Your Vision Once we have seats, roles/responsibilities, and measurable objectives in place, we can add the action items or rocks (as EOS refers to them) from our vision and assign them to the appropriate team members. This is how we strengthen our core functions and ensure we are on track to reach our long-term goals.

“Vision without traction is hallucination.” – EOS Founder Gino Wickman.   [CD0325]