Bottleneck, logjam, impasse, run aground – there are lots of ways to say that things are not moving forward– you’re stuck. We’ve all been there, and once you realize it’s happened, you immediately start looking for ways to get UN-stuck.

While there are many ways that organizations get stuck, it is often the result of an organization outgrowing whatever systems, resources, or people that brought them to where they are. Implementing EOS^® helps you gain traction so you can begin moving forward again, allowing you to get what you want from your business.

At a recent gathering of the EOS Implementer Community™ one of my fellow Implementers shared this quote that may help you figure out where to start:

“Have you ever noticed that the bottleneck is always at the top of the bottle?”

The power of EOS^® is that it gives your company a single way of doing business that's simple and proven. Over 40,000 organizations around the world are running on EOS and getting their business under control. By addressing the Six Key Components™ of your business and providing a model for solving your company's issues for good, EOS helps you grow to achieve your vision and goals more effectively.

But some leadership teams that are running on EOS aren't gaining the traction they'd expected to see when they started using the system. As a leadership team, they're getting more done, solving more issues, and working together better than ever. But the business as a whole isn't improving, and the operations side of the company is still out of control. What's going on?

Two workers in the Operations Department of a company were working one Friday evening to push out a late delivery. One saw a problem about to happen and said to the other, “Look at that! We can’t ship this out. This order is not correct.”

“You’re right,” said the other, “But neither one of us can fix it. Nobody can fix it until Monday. The boss told us to get this shipment out tonight, and we’ll get yelled at if we don’t. Remember what he did the last time something like this happened?”

So out the order went, and in came an angry customer complaint two days later when the order was delivered. And then out went a chunk of the profits from the order because it cost the company three times as much to fix the error than it would have to get it right the first time.

Creating the Accountability Chart with the help of an EOS^® Implementer helps leadership teams identify who is accountable for what, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that the right people are in the right seats. Before you move people into new roles or start hiring new members of the team, you need to start by evaluating whether people GWC the seat – Get it, Want it and have the Capacity to do it.

If you’re like most small to medium sized entrepreneurial companies, you’ve probably tried to visually display how your company is structured or organized. So what’s the best way to do that – with an accountability chart or an organizational chart? What’s the difference?

Organizational charts are focused on who reports to who, but they they typically don’t address one of the major issues most companies struggle with: a lack of clarity around what the major functions of the organization are, and who is accountable for what.

Accountability charts provide clarity about who owns the major functions of an organization and identifies the primary roles and responsibilities for which they are accountable.