How to create accountability as a Finance Business Partner - 3 Tips
Every metric on the slide needs a comparator
Accountability means addressing what’s bad and elevating what’s good. Without a comparator, you don’t know what’s what.
Compare to: prior forecast, operating plan, previous periods
Get to the root cause
No one feels accountable if it’s unclear what caused an issue. Say, we missed the profit target. “Lower sales of product x” is not the root cause. The root cause is “the new website converted fewer leads to paying customers than expected”.
How do you know you found it?
If the cause suggests a clear action that would result in addressing the issue. You can’t simply “increase sales”, but you can “fix a bad website”.
Don’t Escalate
Leadership attention results in action - that’s true. But escalating an issue to someone’s boss hurts the relationship.
What to do instead:
Create a governance process upfront. That’s a regular cadence of review meetings.
The result:
Senior leaders are kept in the loop on wins and issues without the need to escalate.
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