How to keep employees accountable
May 19, 2021
In this episode, we talk about why everyone on your team should have a number.
There's a lot of exciting things happening in my business right now. So we are in the middle of restructuring our entire organization. And a lot of the content from this podcast is inspired from the book Traction by Gino Whitman and I mentioned this book in the previous episode about how should a visionary bring on co-founders.
So kind of to expand on that topic, what are some other groups that you need to have in your organization? So we talked about the visionary and we talked about the integrator. The visionary manages the outside of the business and the integrator manages the inside of the business and then you have three other departments and of course you can split these departments into several other areas, but there's just really three main departments that you need to think about.
And those three main departments are, the first one is sales and marketing, the second one is operations and the third one is finance. So the HR function if you're worried about that, that falls under the finance. So you have sales, marketing, operations, and finance. Under each of these departments, there should be one person that's accountable and if you're just starting out and there's only maybe two or three of you then you're probably wearing a lot of different hats. But the ideal thing to do is to have a captain in charge of each of these departments where only this person is accountable.
And what that does is when that person is accountable for that entire department, they start getting involved a little bit more their function and their roles are much more clearly defined and they know what's expected of them and where the buck actually stops with them. So we have these three departments, we are putting someone that is accountable to each of these departments. And then one of the main takeaways that I got from this book is everyone should have a number.
So this is what I'm doing right now, in this concept of everyone should have a number. And what this means is every single person should be moving towards driving some number up or down, whatever is more optimal for your business. So I'll give you an example. So if you have a sales team, then someone that is setting all the appointments and getting leads to get on phone calls, they might have a number. Their number might be you need to do 20 appointments per week and if you have a graphic design team then it's the same thing. You need to create This many pieces of content per week for a content writer, you need to create 5,000 words per week.
And what happens everyone starts getting a number. You don't have to think only about what they're actually delivering. You can quantify things in so many different ways. So let's say you have a customer service function then that number might be, everyone needs to be able to respond to a customer's request under five minutes. And then that's their number. For me as the visionary, some of my roles include setting the culture, etc. So a number that I've assigned for myself just for that role, that culture role, which is really difficult to make tangible, right? But the way that I put a number to it is I am collecting culture stories.
So with our company's core values and we actually added 1/5 core value by the way. But the core values are Brutal Honesty, Team is Family, build things and play, Yo Hago Lo Que Me Da La Gana, which means freedom, and then the fifth one that we added is One shot, One kill, which means do it right the first time, it doesn't have to be a headshot so it doesn't have to be perfect, but it does have to get the job done and it has to get the job done the very first time that you initiated.
So we added this core value and now my job as the person that's in charge of the culture for this company, I decided that I will collect one story each month that aligns with these core values. So for example, let's look at the core value, build things and play. And uh in our business the other day, she was actually playing around with some data and she had some ideas and she was looking around and trying to see if she can create some insights and she was creating experiments. And this is a great example of embodying this idea where we're building things and playing. She is experimenting, she's testing things out, she wants to see how things works. And she's actually playing with the data, playing with the business model and seeing if we can gather any insights that will help us or if there's anything that's hurting us and this is exactly what we want to do. So that's one story that I was able to create and every single month my job is to find a story, highlight a story. Let all the other employees know about the story. So it really establishes that culture. So that's the main takeaway from for this episode. Anyways, everyone should have a number. And if you're more interested in learning about the book, traction, go check it out by Gina Wickman. The time to start looking at that book is when you do actually have a viable business, you are starting to already make sales and you're just at the beginning and you want a good way to organize your business, so you're not setting yourself up for failure. Hook the house. This is Robin Copernicus, boom bam. I'm out.
Continue your journey with me on my other channels:
So kind of to expand on that topic, what are some other groups that you need to have in your organization? So we talked about the visionary and we talked about the integrator. The visionary manages the outside of the business and the integrator manages the inside of the business and then you have three other departments and of course you can split these departments into several other areas, but there's just really three main departments that you need to think about.
And those three main departments are, the first one is sales and marketing, the second one is operations and the third one is finance. So the HR function if you're worried about that, that falls under the finance. So you have sales, marketing, operations, and finance. Under each of these departments, there should be one person that's accountable and if you're just starting out and there's only maybe two or three of you then you're probably wearing a lot of different hats. But the ideal thing to do is to have a captain in charge of each of these departments where only this person is accountable.
And what that does is when that person is accountable for that entire department, they start getting involved a little bit more their function and their roles are much more clearly defined and they know what's expected of them and where the buck actually stops with them. So we have these three departments, we are putting someone that is accountable to each of these departments. And then one of the main takeaways that I got from this book is everyone should have a number.
So this is what I'm doing right now, in this concept of everyone should have a number. And what this means is every single person should be moving towards driving some number up or down, whatever is more optimal for your business. So I'll give you an example. So if you have a sales team, then someone that is setting all the appointments and getting leads to get on phone calls, they might have a number. Their number might be you need to do 20 appointments per week and if you have a graphic design team then it's the same thing. You need to create This many pieces of content per week for a content writer, you need to create 5,000 words per week.
And what happens everyone starts getting a number. You don't have to think only about what they're actually delivering. You can quantify things in so many different ways. So let's say you have a customer service function then that number might be, everyone needs to be able to respond to a customer's request under five minutes. And then that's their number. For me as the visionary, some of my roles include setting the culture, etc. So a number that I've assigned for myself just for that role, that culture role, which is really difficult to make tangible, right? But the way that I put a number to it is I am collecting culture stories.
So with our company's core values and we actually added 1/5 core value by the way. But the core values are Brutal Honesty, Team is Family, build things and play, Yo Hago Lo Que Me Da La Gana, which means freedom, and then the fifth one that we added is One shot, One kill, which means do it right the first time, it doesn't have to be a headshot so it doesn't have to be perfect, but it does have to get the job done and it has to get the job done the very first time that you initiated.
So we added this core value and now my job as the person that's in charge of the culture for this company, I decided that I will collect one story each month that aligns with these core values. So for example, let's look at the core value, build things and play. And uh in our business the other day, she was actually playing around with some data and she had some ideas and she was looking around and trying to see if she can create some insights and she was creating experiments. And this is a great example of embodying this idea where we're building things and playing. She is experimenting, she's testing things out, she wants to see how things works. And she's actually playing with the data, playing with the business model and seeing if we can gather any insights that will help us or if there's anything that's hurting us and this is exactly what we want to do. So that's one story that I was able to create and every single month my job is to find a story, highlight a story. Let all the other employees know about the story. So it really establishes that culture. So that's the main takeaway from for this episode. Anyways, everyone should have a number. And if you're more interested in learning about the book, traction, go check it out by Gina Wickman. The time to start looking at that book is when you do actually have a viable business, you are starting to already make sales and you're just at the beginning and you want a good way to organize your business, so you're not setting yourself up for failure. Hook the house. This is Robin Copernicus, boom bam. I'm out.
Continue your journey with me on my other channels:
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