“Companies Roll on Roles, The Accountability Chart Rolls on Roles.”
I shared this thought with the EOS Implementer™ community during our quarterly gathering in Denver. Five folks reached out to learn more, so I figured I would share what Uncle Walt means more deeply with the extended community.
Lesson One: Words really matter; stop using the word Role when you mean Seat (Job). A Role is a subunit of a Seat. When your clients or team confuse these words, point it out and ask them to stop. You might have to get aggressive – Tip: It also shows you that the individual does not “G” (Get) this core concept.
Lesson Two: The single, most impactful mental breakthrough most of my teams experience is when they finally get their heads around the fact that their company, their organization actually functions at the Role level, their company rolls on clearly defined and connected Roles, not Seats!
Roles are the key to Structure and a properly aligned Accountability Chart.
Caption: The little circles are roles. Roles are how your structure connects.
Yes, I am an organizational structure nerd and I believe:
“All evil resides in the Accountability Chart” –Gino Wickman
Organizational evil is directly attributable to unclear accountability and/or responsibility, unclear Roles and their interactions.
I am an enemy of confusion and dysfunction. Confusion is the breeding ground for fear and fear creates dysfunction which creates more confusion, driving a never-ending cycle of evil.
Stopping this dysfunction flywheel is the primary purpose of your Accountability chart.
Lesson Three: Your Accountability Chart ties to your Core Processes via Roles. Getting nerdy. I don’t know if this was “EOS® intentional” or not, but there is a globally adopted international standard out there called BPM, Business Process Modeling.
BPMN 2.0. It is the backbone of all process documentation worldwide and in the BPM standard they say Roles follow standard operating procedures and policies and, Roles own the handoff swim-lanes in a workflow/process diagram, NOT Seats / Jobs.
When you know and clearly define Roles, you can ask:
“What procedures are being performed from this Role?”
Yes, this is one way to back-in to documentation. Additionally, when you know the procedure and the Role, you can ask the Role owner:
“Is there an interdependency here?"
Do you hand the work product from this procedure to another Role, or, on the other hand, are you dependent on the work product from another Role being handed to you in a certain form? When the answer is yes, you have identified a Core Process / Workflow that needs to be documented.
I hope you can see how getting Role clarity will help promote deeper, more accurate conversations that will drive out the evil of confusion and dysfunction?
Lesson Four: In the Quarterly Conversation we ask:
“Does the individual GWC® each one of their Roles?”
GWC is at the Role level.
Lesson Five: When we Delegate and Elevate in LMA® we are delegating Roles, being sure the individual Gets Wants and has the Capacity for the Role that is being delegated.
"Companies Roll on Roles." Walt Brown
I hope this helps.
Love,
Uncle Walt
Help First: I have a facilitation exercise I teach with my clients to insure they get a full inventory of all the Roles that exist in their company to be sure their A Chart is complete. It is called “The Flower Power™” – I am happy to share the facilitation with you.