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Welcome to Founder Get Your Life Back.
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I'm your host, Jennifer Todd.
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And on today's episode, we're going to be talking all about why accountability sounds good, but why it often fails in founder-led organizations and what is the missing critical ingredient that you need to make it a success in your business?
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So when I start talking about accountability, that is one of the key things we hear as business advice to founders in order for a founder to get their life back and get out of the weeds is to hold your team accountable.
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But accountable to what?
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And that's the big question.
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If we don't have the proper measures of success in place to hold them accountable, accountability is just not going to work.
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Tell me if this sounds familiar.
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As a founder, you've got a couple of capable team members coming to you with one problem.
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Both of them have differing goals and different answers.
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They can't resolve this problem on their own.
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So they drag you in as the founder, as the final decision maker.
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What is it we have to do?
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What is it we have to have in place in order for them to be able to make these decisions on their own?
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That's what we're going to deep dive into in today's episode.
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Businesses by default have a lot of conflicting goals inside of an organization.
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So, for instance, sales will have a revenue goal and your delivery team will have project due dates.
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And oftentimes those two things will be in direct conflict with each other because sales will make promises based on meeting their sales goals while the delivery team is struggling to keep the projects that are already in process on time.
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And so they already don't have the capacity maybe to take on more projects.
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And yet sales is bringing in more of these projects, right?
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What often happens is we have problems inside of our organization because we have what I called siloed departments with siloed goals.
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And so all of these siloed goals and siloed departments have to work together.
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There's natural conflicts built into almost all of our business processes.
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When I'm thinking about a business, I picture it in my mind as one big system.
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This is what being a systems thinker allows me to do is to see all of the connecting parts, but also all the baby systems inside of the one big system inside of a business or an organization.
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And so each system affects the other.
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You can think of this and also in terms of your body.
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So when one part of your body doesn't work well, it's going to affect multiple systems inside of your body.
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If you have a defective cardiovascular system, it's going to make you tired.
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It's the same thing with a business.
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Just having a team is not going to solve that founder bottleneck problem if the team doesn't have the right success measures in place to be able to be held accountable and to make their decisions on their own.
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In my consulting practice, I call this having an autonomous and accountable team.
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And that is the goal of our decision view engagements.
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It's a level three-tier engagement where we empower the team to make decisions on their own.
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They become autonomous and they become accountable, free the founder, and get them out of the weeds.
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So, how do we empower our team?
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When they have their own specific goals, they have no problem stepping up into their own specific goals.
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So the goal is to have them step back for a minute and actually view the whole company and how that goal in their agenda affects the entire company system.
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So common accountability advice, it's well-meaning, but unless it really builds in those measures of success in a holistic way, it's going to fail inside of most organizations.
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And it's missing that component.
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Systems like EOS, there it's really great at assigning roles and responsibilities and outcomes.
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It's really great at identifying bottlenecks and issues and things like that.
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But it does miss a little bit of what I gear my consulting on, which is customer centricity.
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So our measures of success always, always have to take into account the customer's point of view and their experience, how they are going to be affected by whatever decision or whatever conflict is coming up.
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Not every conflict is customer-based or customer-facing, but most decisions in your business are going to have an effect on the customer one way or the other eventually, even if it's indirectly.
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So roles, owners, goals, KPIs, and scorecards, those tools are 100% needed.
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They create clarity, they create what I call visibility inside of your organization on how well you're doing or how well your business is carrying out its goals.
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But before you decide who owns the number, you have to decide what that number is supposed to protect.
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Again, we need to take a lot of our goals and a lot of our KPIs off of us and back onto the customer and how it affects the customer.
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And I know this sounds a little bit difficult because it requires us to think further than how is this affecting me today in this task I'm trying to get done, in this goal I've been given, in this metric I've been tasked with trying to reach and accomplish.
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And so when we start thinking bigger than ourselves and look at the business as a system and look at all the different systems inside of our business, all the stakeholders that are affected by our business, there are a lot of them, especially our customers, that takes a lot of the guesswork out of it.
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And remember what I always say: if you have a business and you don't have customers, you don't really have a business.
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You have a very expensive hobby.
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So we have to keep our customers happy and we have to base our measures of success on the final outcome, how it's going to affect the customer, and why we're actually in business to begin with.
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Contradictions, they're built into every single business.
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I mean, we cannot get away from them.
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So we have to create systems and we have to create defaults in order to navigate when a conflict comes up.
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I may have already talked about this in a different episode, but I can remember setting defaults in my accounting practice, especially when I had a partner, and sticky situations would come up.
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We had some automatic rules of thumb that we would make our judgments.
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In the accounting industry, it's called using professional judgment.
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And it's one of the code of conduct things that we're required to do as certified public accountants.
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And so you develop professional judgment through experience.
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One of the things that we would see common issues popping up over and over again.
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And so we made some professional judgment defaults.
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And we also would build in uh ways to evaluate how far reaching was the issue that was being discussed or that was causing a conflict.
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Who was going to be affected?
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What's the most conservative approach?
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What's at risk?
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So there's a lot of things that we would already work out for our team members so that they didn't have to do the heavy lifting.
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You can do that to free yourself somewhat out of the weeds, but there's always going to be some new type of conflict.
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You cannot create defaults for every single thing.
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So what we have to do is really focus on what I call one definition of success.
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And when you have that inside of your organization, your organization is going to change because all of a sudden we have criteria that didn't exist before, um, how it will help us answer questions and come up with solutions to problems and issues when they arise.
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One definition of success when I work with my clients, it is something that we go very deep on and we spend a lot of time on because we have to develop it in context to their organization.
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It is way deeper and more actionable than a mission statement or a vision statement, which those are great.
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But a lot of times your mission statement or your vision statement can cause some of these issues to pop up.
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Not everyone is bought in to a vision or a mission statement, but when we have our one definition of success, we include every department in the organization.
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We have to include them in order to make sure that your entire team is bought in.
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So a statement on a wall, like a mission statement, cannot make a decision on a trade-off on a Tuesday afternoon.
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It's just not detailed enough.
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It is very broad, it's very big picture.
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Oftentimes it's visionary, inspirational, but it's not necessarily actionable.
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Your customer defines what's valuable.
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And they do that by telling you what they want from you.
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Why are they here?
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Why are they buying from you?
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What is the transformation we're getting them from point A to point B that I talked about in last week's episode?
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And that transformation, that's the value we're providing to them.
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And so they define the value.
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The customer tells the company what they care about and what good looks like.
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So not only do they tell you what transformation they want, they tell you kind of how they want it, not necessarily like how you're going to perform your services, but how they want to be treated, what kind of customer experience they want when they're going through and dealing with you and your team.
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And then they tell you how much that result is worth paying.
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They know that there's a ceiling to what they're willing to pay.
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They don't necessarily know the floor.
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Oftentimes we're pricing at the floor when we should be pricing at the ceiling.
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So it's our job as founders and owners to find out what that pricing ceiling is, what's the most that a customer is going to pay for the transformation that we're giving them?
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Stay there because we have to figure out how at that price we're going to be profitable.
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Okay.
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We started talking about accountability, and you're like, Jennifer, what does all this stuff have to do with accountability?
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We have to hold our team accountable to a definition of success, one organizational definition of success that is customer-centric.
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It evolves from what the customer values, and everyone has to be held accountable to that end result.
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Now, I'm oversimplifying because most organizations deliver more than one type of product or service.
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But this is a universal concept.
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It shows up in how a business does business, how they treat their customers, how much autonomy they allow their team members to have, how much FaceTime the founder gives, how much FaceTime the founder doesn't give, and what they reserve that for, what they want to be known in the market for.
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I'm oversimplifying your one definition of success on purpose because it's not a mission statement, but it's actionable and it trickles down.
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We start at the organization and then it trickles down through every department so that it's applicable to every department.
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Okay.
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And you're saying, okay, Jennifer, in your episode about founder identity, you talked about not allowing the customer to drive the bus.
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I was giving you a story about how I couldn't say no.
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I did work that I didn't love and I kept offers that I didn't love for a long time.
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So that's not what I'm saying we're allowing our customer to do.
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We still have to be in alignment.
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We have to love what we're offering.
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Our customer has to love paying for it, and then we have to be profitable at it.
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They have a lot of control, especially nowadays in the market, with social proof and so much information available on the internet, and anybody can research anything.
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And so we want to make sure that we are showing up as the best choice for them in whatever need we're fulfilling for our customers.
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So they don't necessarily choose our offers.
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We choose our offers, but they say how valuable they are to them.
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So listening to the customer does not require handing them the wheel.
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Saying no to wrong fit customers, work deadlines, request, protect your capacity, your profit, and the customers that you serve the best.
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Um, a weak yes often serves the customer uh worse than a clear no.
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Steve Jobs is my favorite.
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He often said, I'm more proud of what we don't do than what we do do.
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And that is one of the things that keeps me centered and saying yes to less and really focusing on your offer and being the best at what you do and only what you can do.
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Let's talk a little bit more about that one definition of success because it's so powerful.
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It creates the common ground.
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The definition of success must reflect the customer's value.
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And it must apply across all deliverables.
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So even though we may have multiple deliverables, it has to apply to each one.
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We don't change the definition for each deliverable.
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Um, it also has to match your company's value proposition.
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So what it is you do uniquely, the reason why customers choose you over your competitors, and then represent the work that your company does the best.
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What this does, circling back to accountability, is it gives your team what's called a triangulation point.
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So we have two team members in conflict, and you used to be that triangulation point, the founder, the problem solver.
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So you don't want to be part of that triangle.
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You want your team members to resolve as much of their own problems as possible.
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So team member one and team member two in conflict, the triangulation point is our one definition of success, which is basically your customer.
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So they have to remember what the customer wants and apply that one definition of success.
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When goals conflict, the team can consider two connected questions.
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One is what will this mean for our customer's experience with us?
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And what will the decision do to our bottom line?
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So not only do they have to think about the customer's experience, but then how does that affect profitability inside of the company?
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So that means they need to be aware of how their actions and their decisions affect the overall success of the company.
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And that requires a little bit of transparency in dealing with your team.
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But it is important to quantify some of your goals with your team and let them know the status of your company's success because they need to remember that every action they take or every inaction they take affects the bottom line in one way or another.
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Oftentimes, this is most easily noticeable in quality.
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So when you have to rework jobs or replace defective parts or fix things that were broken at customers' homes or anything like that, that's expensive to you.
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You cannot bill for that.
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You cannot charge a customer for mistakes that your team makes.
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That's one of the easiest ways to show them.
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But there's a lot of hidden cost.
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And I'm going to do a full episode on hidden cost inside of your business that we eliminate to give you more profitability.
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But they need to be able to understand that every single action comes with some sort of dollar sign on it.
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And they want your business to be profitable and successful because they want a job.
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We want everyone to be happy.
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So when we weigh those two questions, what does this mean for the customer experience?
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And then how does this affect the bottom line?
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The team can make decisions.
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They can weigh fit, quality, capacity.
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Do we have the capacity to do this job?
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Are we going to do it well?
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Um, does the customer actually fit our profile?
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Is this a great fit customer?
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If not, we don't want the sales team making promises that we don't really want to deliver on.
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Are we doing this in a way that's most profitable for the company without negatively our customer's experience?
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So when they can consider all of these things, they are more empowered to come up with decisions on their own.
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And of course, this takes work and it takes practice and it starts with really small decisions.
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But over time, just like a CPA develops professional judgment, your team members will too develop their own professional judgment in making these decisions without you.
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Your customer unites your decisions while the economics of the decision, keep it honest.
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So accountability measures come after we have our one definition of success.
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And it's got to be really strong.
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When I work with my customers, creating this one definition of success, it is built off of a KPI framework that I'm trained on from the master, Mernie Smith.
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He's got six strategic goals, and I've modified them for the lower mid-market companies that I work with to be more relevant to them because he works with huge Fortune 500 companies.
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And um, we have six areas that we cover under our one definition of success.
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So it's very strategic and it's very well structured.
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And again, we get buy-in from all of the team members so that we're making a definition that makes sense across the board.
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It's really fun and exciting work when we do it.
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So when that happens, some really great things happen in your business.
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Accountability measures come after success is defined.
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So the right KPIs are going to be formulated because we know what success looks like at the organizational level.
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And then we start working our way down each team to the individual.
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A KPI can measure one part of a shared success, but it doesn't create separate versions of success.
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So your sales and your delivery team eventually will not have those conflicts.
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Or if they do, they should be much easier to resolve because we've already had some defaults in our one definition of success that we've created.
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So once we have some accountability that actually works because it's triangulated around the customer and our one definition of success, then we have autonomy.
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So accountability and autonomy work hand in hand.
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And the right KPIs show whether or not your team member in each role is doing what's within their power to make sure that the company stays profitable and the customers have a good experience.
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If you can nail those two things in your business, there's hardly anything that will hinder your success, barring something catastrophic that's outside of your control.
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Customer experience is the new definition of success in your business.
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It could not be more relevant today than any other time, especially in the age of AI.
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And I keep bringing up AI in all the videos I do, not because it's a buzzword or a keyword, but because it's extremely important.
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It's changing the landscape of professional services and also empowering customers.
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And so we need to be extremely aware of how we are serving our customers and making sure that they have a good customer experience with us.
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So, what does accountability look like when it becomes autonomous?
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When your team is able to make decisions by themselves.
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What does it look like for the founder who's finally out of the weeds?
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That's huge, right?
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So, what that looks like is founder freedom and ability to actually be strategic in your business or show up in a different role inside of your business.
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And I can think of nothing more satisfying than that.
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It also means that as a founder, you've finally gotten to the place where you've got the right support system under you to do what you want to do with the business, ensuring it's profitable, ensuring your customers have a good experience, and that your team is making the right decisions without you stepping in every single time.
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So, how does that sound to you?
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These are the results that I love delivering for my customers because it's just so satisfying to see the team is winning because they're happy, because they're not frustrated, and the founder's happy because they're out of the wheeze, and then your customer's happy because they're having an excellent experience with you.
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So that is what I call a triple win.
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And that's the goal.
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We want at least three, if not four wins, somebody else is benefiting.
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Who could that fourth beneficiary be of your one definition of success?
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So that's my question I'm going to pose to you today.
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If, listener, you've got a clear definition of success in your business where the founder's happy and free, your team is autonomous and accountable, and your customers having a great experience.
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Who could be your fourth winner in that scenario?
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Could it be your customers' customers?
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Could it be your family as the founder?
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They finally get more of you.
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Could it be your team's family members?
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So let me know who else it might be.
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I hope you enjoyed this episode of Founder Get Your Life Back.
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My name is Jennifer Todd.
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I'm your host.
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And if this rang true for you, if it felt like something that could be useful for you, there is a link below to schedule a 90 minute strategy session with me, and we can talk about it and see what might be some of the roadblocks or the potential inside of your business.
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And founder, I hope you get your life back.
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Thank you for joining me today.
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Welcome to Founder Get Your Life Back.
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I'm your host, Jennifer Todd.
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And on today's episode, we're going to be talking all about why accountability sounds good, but why it often fails in founder-led organizations and what is the missing critical ingredient that you need to make it a success in your business?
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So when I start talking about accountability, that is one of the key things we hear as business advice to founders in order for a founder to get their life back and get out of the weeds is to hold your team accountable.
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But accountable to what?
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And that's the big question.
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If we don't have the proper measures of success in place to hold them accountable, accountability is just not going to work.
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Tell me if this sounds familiar.
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As a founder, you've got a couple of capable team members coming to you with one problem.
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Both of them have differing goals and different answers.
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They can't resolve this problem on their own.
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So they drag you in as the founder, as the final decision maker.
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What is it we have to do?
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What is it we have to have in place in order for them to be able to make these decisions on their own?
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That's what we're going to deep dive into in today's episode.
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Businesses by default have a lot of conflicting goals inside of an organization.
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So, for instance, sales will have a revenue goal and your delivery team will have project due dates.
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And oftentimes those two things will be in direct conflict with each other because sales will make promises based on meeting their sales goals while the delivery team is struggling to keep the projects that are already in process on time.
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And so they already don't have the capacity maybe to take on more projects.
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And yet sales is bringing in more of these projects, right?
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What often happens is we have problems inside of our organization because we have what I called siloed departments with siloed goals.
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And so all of these siloed goals and siloed departments have to work together.
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There's natural conflicts built into almost all of our business processes.
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When I'm thinking about a business, I picture it in my mind as one big system.
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This is what being a systems thinker allows me to do is to see all of the connecting parts, but also all the baby systems inside of the one big system inside of a business or an organization.
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And so each system affects the other.
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You can think of this and also in terms of your body.
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So when one part of your body doesn't work well, it's going to affect multiple systems inside of your body.
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If you have a defective cardiovascular system, it's going to make you tired.
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It's the same thing with a business.
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Just having a team is not going to solve that founder bottleneck problem if the team doesn't have the right success measures in place to be able to be held accountable and to make their decisions on their own.
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In my consulting practice, I call this having an autonomous and accountable team.
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And that is the goal of our decision view engagements.
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It's a level three-tier engagement where we empower the team to make decisions on their own.
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They become autonomous and they become accountable, free the founder, and get them out of the weeds.
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So, how do we empower our team?
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When they have their own specific goals, they have no problem stepping up into their own specific goals.
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So the goal is to have them step back for a minute and actually view the whole company and how that goal in their agenda affects the entire company system.
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So common accountability advice, it's well-meaning, but unless it really builds in those measures of success in a holistic way, it's going to fail inside of most organizations.
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And it's missing that component.
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Systems like EOS, there it's really great at assigning roles and responsibilities and outcomes.
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It's really great at identifying bottlenecks and issues and things like that.
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But it does miss a little bit of what I gear my consulting on, which is customer centricity.
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So our measures of success always, always have to take into account the customer's point of view and their experience, how they are going to be affected by whatever decision or whatever conflict is coming up.
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Not every conflict is customer-based or customer-facing, but most decisions in your business are going to have an effect on the customer one way or the other eventually, even if it's indirectly.
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So roles, owners, goals, KPIs, and scorecards, those tools are 100% needed.
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They create clarity, they create what I call visibility inside of your organization on how well you're doing or how well your business is carrying out its goals.
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But before you decide who owns the number, you have to decide what that number is supposed to protect.
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Again, we need to take a lot of our goals and a lot of our KPIs off of us and back onto the customer and how it affects the customer.
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And I know this sounds a little bit difficult because it requires us to think further than how is this affecting me today in this task I'm trying to get done, in this goal I've been given, in this metric I've been tasked with trying to reach and accomplish.
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And so when we start thinking bigger than ourselves and look at the business as a system and look at all the different systems inside of our business, all the stakeholders that are affected by our business, there are a lot of them, especially our customers, that takes a lot of the guesswork out of it.
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And remember what I always say: if you have a business and you don't have customers, you don't really have a business.
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You have a very expensive hobby.
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So we have to keep our customers happy and we have to base our measures of success on the final outcome, how it's going to affect the customer, and why we're actually in business to begin with.
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Contradictions, they're built into every single business.
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I mean, we cannot get away from them.
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So we have to create systems and we have to create defaults in order to navigate when a conflict comes up.
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I may have already talked about this in a different episode, but I can remember setting defaults in my accounting practice, especially when I had a partner, and sticky situations would come up.
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We had some automatic rules of thumb that we would make our judgments.
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In the accounting industry, it's called using professional judgment.
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And it's one of the code of conduct things that we're required to do as certified public accountants.
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And so you develop professional judgment through experience.
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One of the things that we would see common issues popping up over and over again.
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And so we made some professional judgment defaults.
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And we also would build in uh ways to evaluate how far reaching was the issue that was being discussed or that was causing a conflict.
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Who was going to be affected?
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What's the most conservative approach?
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What's at risk?
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So there's a lot of things that we would already work out for our team members so that they didn't have to do the heavy lifting.
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You can do that to free yourself somewhat out of the weeds, but there's always going to be some new type of conflict.
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You cannot create defaults for every single thing.
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So what we have to do is really focus on what I call one definition of success.
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And when you have that inside of your organization, your organization is going to change because all of a sudden we have criteria that didn't exist before, um, how it will help us answer questions and come up with solutions to problems and issues when they arise.
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One definition of success when I work with my clients, it is something that we go very deep on and we spend a lot of time on because we have to develop it in context to their organization.
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It is way deeper and more actionable than a mission statement or a vision statement, which those are great.
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But a lot of times your mission statement or your vision statement can cause some of these issues to pop up.
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Not everyone is bought in to a vision or a mission statement, but when we have our one definition of success, we include every department in the organization.
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We have to include them in order to make sure that your entire team is bought in.
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So a statement on a wall, like a mission statement, cannot make a decision on a trade-off on a Tuesday afternoon.
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It's just not detailed enough.
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It is very broad, it's very big picture.
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Oftentimes it's visionary, inspirational, but it's not necessarily actionable.
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Your customer defines what's valuable.
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And they do that by telling you what they want from you.
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Why are they here?
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Why are they buying from you?
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What is the transformation we're getting them from point A to point B that I talked about in last week's episode?
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And that transformation, that's the value we're providing to them.
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And so they define the value.
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The customer tells the company what they care about and what good looks like.
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So not only do they tell you what transformation they want, they tell you kind of how they want it, not necessarily like how you're going to perform your services, but how they want to be treated, what kind of customer experience they want when they're going through and dealing with you and your team.
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And then they tell you how much that result is worth paying.
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They know that there's a ceiling to what they're willing to pay.
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They don't necessarily know the floor.
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Oftentimes we're pricing at the floor when we should be pricing at the ceiling.
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So it's our job as founders and owners to find out what that pricing ceiling is, what's the most that a customer is going to pay for the transformation that we're giving them?
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Stay there because we have to figure out how at that price we're going to be profitable.
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Okay.
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We started talking about accountability, and you're like, Jennifer, what does all this stuff have to do with accountability?
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We have to hold our team accountable to a definition of success, one organizational definition of success that is customer-centric.
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It evolves from what the customer values, and everyone has to be held accountable to that end result.
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Now, I'm oversimplifying because most organizations deliver more than one type of product or service.
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But this is a universal concept.
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It shows up in how a business does business, how they treat their customers, how much autonomy they allow their team members to have, how much FaceTime the founder gives, how much FaceTime the founder doesn't give, and what they reserve that for, what they want to be known in the market for.
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I'm oversimplifying your one definition of success on purpose because it's not a mission statement, but it's actionable and it trickles down.
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We start at the organization and then it trickles down through every department so that it's applicable to every department.
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Okay.
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And you're saying, okay, Jennifer, in your episode about founder identity, you talked about not allowing the customer to drive the bus.
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I was giving you a story about how I couldn't say no.
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I did work that I didn't love and I kept offers that I didn't love for a long time.
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So that's not what I'm saying we're allowing our customer to do.
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We still have to be in alignment.
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We have to love what we're offering.
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Our customer has to love paying for it, and then we have to be profitable at it.
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They have a lot of control, especially nowadays in the market, with social proof and so much information available on the internet, and anybody can research anything.
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And so we want to make sure that we are showing up as the best choice for them in whatever need we're fulfilling for our customers.
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So they don't necessarily choose our offers.
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We choose our offers, but they say how valuable they are to them.
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So listening to the customer does not require handing them the wheel.
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Saying no to wrong fit customers, work deadlines, request, protect your capacity, your profit, and the customers that you serve the best.
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Um, a weak yes often serves the customer uh worse than a clear no.
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Steve Jobs is my favorite.
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He often said, I'm more proud of what we don't do than what we do do.
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And that is one of the things that keeps me centered and saying yes to less and really focusing on your offer and being the best at what you do and only what you can do.
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Let's talk a little bit more about that one definition of success because it's so powerful.
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It creates the common ground.
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The definition of success must reflect the customer's value.
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And it must apply across all deliverables.
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So even though we may have multiple deliverables, it has to apply to each one.
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We don't change the definition for each deliverable.
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Um, it also has to match your company's value proposition.
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So what it is you do uniquely, the reason why customers choose you over your competitors, and then represent the work that your company does the best.
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What this does, circling back to accountability, is it gives your team what's called a triangulation point.
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So we have two team members in conflict, and you used to be that triangulation point, the founder, the problem solver.
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So you don't want to be part of that triangle.
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You want your team members to resolve as much of their own problems as possible.
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So team member one and team member two in conflict, the triangulation point is our one definition of success, which is basically your customer.
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So they have to remember what the customer wants and apply that one definition of success.
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When goals conflict, the team can consider two connected questions.
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One is what will this mean for our customer's experience with us?
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And what will the decision do to our bottom line?
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So not only do they have to think about the customer's experience, but then how does that affect profitability inside of the company?
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So that means they need to be aware of how their actions and their decisions affect the overall success of the company.
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And that requires a little bit of transparency in dealing with your team.
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But it is important to quantify some of your goals with your team and let them know the status of your company's success because they need to remember that every action they take or every inaction they take affects the bottom line in one way or another.
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Oftentimes, this is most easily noticeable in quality.
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So when you have to rework jobs or replace defective parts or fix things that were broken at customers' homes or anything like that, that's expensive to you.
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You cannot bill for that.
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You cannot charge a customer for mistakes that your team makes.
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That's one of the easiest ways to show them.
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But there's a lot of hidden cost.
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And I'm going to do a full episode on hidden cost inside of your business that we eliminate to give you more profitability.
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But they need to be able to understand that every single action comes with some sort of dollar sign on it.
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And they want your business to be profitable and successful because they want a job.
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We want everyone to be happy.
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So when we weigh those two questions, what does this mean for the customer experience?
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And then how does this affect the bottom line?
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The team can make decisions.
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They can weigh fit, quality, capacity.
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Do we have the capacity to do this job?
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Are we going to do it well?
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Um, does the customer actually fit our profile?
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Is this a great fit customer?
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If not, we don't want the sales team making promises that we don't really want to deliver on.
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Are we doing this in a way that's most profitable for the company without negatively our customer's experience?
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So when they can consider all of these things, they are more empowered to come up with decisions on their own.
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And of course, this takes work and it takes practice and it starts with really small decisions.
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But over time, just like a CPA develops professional judgment, your team members will too develop their own professional judgment in making these decisions without you.
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Your customer unites your decisions while the economics of the decision, keep it honest.
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So accountability measures come after we have our one definition of success.
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And it's got to be really strong.
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When I work with my customers, creating this one definition of success, it is built off of a KPI framework that I'm trained on from the master, Mernie Smith.
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He's got six strategic goals, and I've modified them for the lower mid-market companies that I work with to be more relevant to them because he works with huge Fortune 500 companies.
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And um, we have six areas that we cover under our one definition of success.
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So it's very strategic and it's very well structured.
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And again, we get buy-in from all of the team members so that we're making a definition that makes sense across the board.
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It's really fun and exciting work when we do it.
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So when that happens, some really great things happen in your business.
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Accountability measures come after success is defined.
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So the right KPIs are going to be formulated because we know what success looks like at the organizational level.
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And then we start working our way down each team to the individual.
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A KPI can measure one part of a shared success, but it doesn't create separate versions of success.
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So your sales and your delivery team eventually will not have those conflicts.
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Or if they do, they should be much easier to resolve because we've already had some defaults in our one definition of success that we've created.
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So once we have some accountability that actually works because it's triangulated around the customer and our one definition of success, then we have autonomy.
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So accountability and autonomy work hand in hand.
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And the right KPIs show whether or not your team member in each role is doing what's within their power to make sure that the company stays profitable and the customers have a good experience.
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If you can nail those two things in your business, there's hardly anything that will hinder your success, barring something catastrophic that's outside of your control.
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Customer experience is the new definition of success in your business.
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It could not be more relevant today than any other time, especially in the age of AI.
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And I keep bringing up AI in all the videos I do, not because it's a buzzword or a keyword, but because it's extremely important.
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It's changing the landscape of professional services and also empowering customers.
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And so we need to be extremely aware of how we are serving our customers and making sure that they have a good customer experience with us.
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So, what does accountability look like when it becomes autonomous?
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When your team is able to make decisions by themselves.
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What does it look like for the founder who's finally out of the weeds?
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That's huge, right?
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So, what that looks like is founder freedom and ability to actually be strategic in your business or show up in a different role inside of your business.
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And I can think of nothing more satisfying than that.
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It also means that as a founder, you've finally gotten to the place where you've got the right support system under you to do what you want to do with the business, ensuring it's profitable, ensuring your customers have a good experience, and that your team is making the right decisions without you stepping in every single time.
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So, how does that sound to you?
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These are the results that I love delivering for my customers because it's just so satisfying to see the team is winning because they're happy, because they're not frustrated, and the founder's happy because they're out of the wheeze, and then your customer's happy because they're having an excellent experience with you.
00:21:38.240 --> 00:21:40.319
So that is what I call a triple win.
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And that's the goal.
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We want at least three, if not four wins, somebody else is benefiting.
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Who could that fourth beneficiary be of your one definition of success?
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So that's my question I'm going to pose to you today.
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If, listener, you've got a clear definition of success in your business where the founder's happy and free, your team is autonomous and accountable, and your customers having a great experience.
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Who could be your fourth winner in that scenario?
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Could it be your customers' customers?
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Could it be your family as the founder?
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They finally get more of you.
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Could it be your team's family members?
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So let me know who else it might be.
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I hope you enjoyed this episode of Founder Get Your Life Back.
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My name is Jennifer Todd.
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I'm your host.
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And if this rang true for you, if it felt like something that could be useful for you, there is a link below to schedule a 90 minute strategy session with me, and we can talk about it and see what might be some of the roadblocks or the potential inside of your business.
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And founder, I hope you get your life back.
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Thank you for joining me today.
