Are your People Doing the Right Things?

Are you working on maximizing accountability in your startup team?

It would mean, that you can property delegate all these responsibilities down and rely on people to actually deliver the results that you need.

In the previous blog we talked about worksheet number one of our accountability round table, and that is do you have the right seats around the table? Look at that first if you haven’t yet. Click here.

We want to take it one step further by asking are the people around the table doing the right thing?

The right things - what exactly are the right things?

Well, I like to really keep it simple.

Most people like to draw up an enormous laundry list of all the things that they are responsible for, thereby making it much less risky if they miss a target or two.

That’s what you do NOT want.

You want to make sure that they have a very clear focus target in line with Peter Thiel, at Paypal in those days.

Everyone’s responsible for just one thing.

What is that one thing?

Well, I like to phrase it as follows:

turn X into Y by Z

It’s a very simple formula that talks about input, output, and throughput.

So turn X (the input) into Y (the output) by Z (that’s the throughput) or the process that you do. And that’s all I need to know about every department.

Let’s take marketing as an example.

Turn product excitement into qualified leads by campaigning.

If they don’t have product excitement as an input, very hard to do proper marketing. If they do not produce qualified leads as an output, they do not really have a reason to exist in the B2B startup, right? And then the way they do it is by campaigning.

So that’s basically just a best practice, common way of doing it. If they find another way, that’s fine, but this is to focus the internal team in marketing on what their key activity is.

Now, every department should have this “turn-into-by” statement.

We have a blank version where everyone can come up with their own, or you can take our suggested version that is optimized for a B2B software startups, and for each of the common functions in there, we already have statements available.

If you have a function that you do not have the statement for, we have an even bigger library. Just contact and ask us what would be a typical turn X into Y by Z statements for your function of compliance or legal or security or whatever other function you may have around the leadership table.

That is all you need to do to make sure that everyone around the table is extremely focused on the right thing. That was number two of our accountability roundtable worksheets.

In number three, we will talk about the dependencies are the handovers between those departments also, right.

If you want to know if you the people in your leadership table are doing the right thing, then there is a very easy tool that you can fill-out.

This worksheet “Accountability Round Table #2: Right Things” is available for download below.