Accountability Dashboards

Did your group spend some time doing some planning? Do you follow through and achieve success?

These questions go through my head all the time. Whether I’m facilitating the planning or as a member of the planning group. There is excitement and visioning that takes place during planning, but when it comes to execution and accountability those plans can fall through the cracks.

This is where dashboards comes in. Make dashboards visible to board members frequently. As a facilitator I create dashboards for all action and strategic plans and provide those to my clients. As a executive director we include dashboards in our meeting agendas. It’s a quick way to see where we are, where we are falling behind and where we are going.

Out of sight is out of mind when it comes to action plans and more importantly strategic directions. Creating simple dashboards and using a color coding system makes it pretty easy to see:

What is accomplished (green)
What is concerning (yellow)
What we need to address or reevaluate (red)

As a group seeing green gives your board members a chance to celebrate. Celebrating boosts motivation. Seeing yellow puts people on alert and can also jump start progress. See red definitely indicates that the issue needs to be addressed. If an issue needs to be addressed it isn’t necessarily a negative. It is an opportunity to game plan, strategize and refocus. It may just lead you to an opportunity.

Keep your board or your team accountable. Try a dashboard for strategy or action planning.