Business performance coaching is all about helping clients do better in business, whether they own a business, manage a business, have an executive position, or hold a regular job in a company, small or large.

What are Key Accountabilities?

A key accountability sounds as if it’s a fancy corporate term for some obscure task or position within a company. However, it’s crucial to the proper functioning of a job, a team, and an organization.

Key accountabilities are:

• A critical reason a job or a team exists
• A result that is crucial to the proper performance of a specific job.
• A result that someone is responsible for within a team or an organization.
• Key accountabilities can be either positive (sales, helping with manufacturing a specific product, or assisting with a service) or negative (reducing the amount of unsatisfied customers or the amount of on-the-job accidents).

What is Business Performance Coaching?

If you’re a business coach, you are already a business performance coach. Coaching business clients is all about identifying goals, creating a plan to reach those goals, and assessing progress. This means you are helping your clients improve performance and coaching them to do better in business, whether they are an owner, an executive, or an employee.

Why Key Accountabilities Matter and Why You Should Know What They Are

Are you a business owner? Are you a team supervisor? Are you an executive in a large corporation? Are you an employee slaving away in a cubicle? Or, are you a business coach?

It doesn’t matter which one you are, you need to understand key accountabilities, and effective business performance coaching will help you gain understanding and knowledge.

So, why do key accountabilities matter?

• It helps you keep your job. Your job has a purpose and you should completely understand the reason your job exists.
• It helps managers and executives recognize high performance, and gives employees a way to evaluate their own performance within a team or an organization.
• It helps managers and employees prioritize tasks and results. The more they understand key accountabilities, the more precise and correct their prioritization will be.

Why It’s Crucial for Owners or Managers to Understand Key Accountabilities

We’ve touched on the reasons owners, executives, or team managers need to understand key accountabilities, but there is one additional reason that is perhaps the most important reason. This reason is also the motivation for owners and managers to seek out and pay for business performance coaching.

For most organizations the largest expense is usually the labor force. An organization’s employees often account for a high percentage of the total money spent to operate a business. If you own a business, you want to completely understand why each job position exists, what each employee or supervisors does, and what results should be created from the various jobs, tasks, and positions. You want to make sure each employee is worth the money you are paying them, and you want to ensure each position is needed and contributing to the profitability and goals of an organization.

So coaches, business performance coaching should focus on identifying and understanding key accountabilities. Your clients need to know this, and if you have the skills and knowledge to help, then your business coaching practice will succeed and prosper.

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Fred Philips
Business Coach
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