Clarify Roles and Responsibilities to reduce the chaos in your team
Photo credit: @nasa on unsplash
A leader must provide Clarity
Without structure and clarity, team members will wonder where they stand. They will discuss their confusion and uncertainty with each other. They will spend cycles worrying and wondering instead of getting to the necessary work.
Providing Structure and Clarity is the 2nd of my 10 key leadership skills.
High-performing teams have clear roles, responsibilities, values, objectives, and a strategy to accomplish their goals. It is up to the leader of the team to provide this structure and to communicate it plainly to the team.
When you are small, it can be more challenging, not less.
It is counterintuitive, you’d think that in a large company, things would be less clear, but I find that small companies can be more challenging because people are wearing so many different hats, and the lines between people and projects are more blurry.
Your team is small, your goals are large, and you likely don’t have the luxury of people that only manage other people.
Typically in small teams, everyone is doing work, and managing themselves and possibly others. The team needs to stay flexible to rapidly changing business objectives and client priorities.
But a team without a clear understanding of everyone's responsibilities and roles will not be as effective as it could be. They will spend energy and time being confused, trying to figure out what others are doing, and what they should be doing. They will have uncertainty and doubt and trust in the team may not be as high as it could be. It is also likely that multiple people will be working on the same thing, unbeknownst to each other.
Discover your leadership archetype.
I’ve created a leadership quiz to help you determine your leadership archetype. Your archetype will reveal many of your strengths, and point to qualities and skills you may need to develop in order to become a better leader.
4 ways you can ensure clarity and alignment of roles and responsibilities in your team.
#1 Clarify the team's overall purpose.
Clarify what the team is striving to accomplish in the world that is bigger than quarterly revenue goals.
Doing this will help ensure you get the right people on the team who will be motivated by your team’s purpose.
Having a clear, shared purpose is a great start to keeping a team aligned, making decisions more effectively, and having clarity and confidence that their role in the team is making a real difference, bigger than what they might otherwise see in their day-to-day.
But so often, the company’s or team’s purpose is not made clear to people.
If you are the leader, the purpose may be obvious to you. However, unless you are actively communicating it, and engaging your team with it, it is not obvious to everyone else.
#2 Clarify the team’s values.
“Values are like fingerprints. Nobody’s are the same, but you leave ‘em all over everything you do”
The same can be said of an organization or a team.
Clients or customers can sense your values when they work with you. Think about the different restaurants you go to, some value great food over personal service, and others value speed and consistency of the food over creativity.
What are your team’s values?
Rather than making a list of values, it can be more useful to create a type of manifesto that helps clarify what the team values more, or most. For example: “We value creativity of thought over speed of delivery” can be a useful value to refer back to when a project faces being late. It can help guide the team to deciding that perhaps a late delivery of a project is acceptable if the work product is not to the creative standard typically produced by the team.
It isn’t that you don’t value being on time, but you value a creative work product more.
In order to support clarity, don’t create a long or overly complex set of values. Keeping the list short means that people will remember them. I really love the Agile Manifesto from the software industry as a model for a useful set of values.
#3 Clarify the team’s objectives and key results.
What are the overall results that your team needs to accomplish within a certain time period?
Who is responsible for each result?
Which objectives are more important than others, at this time?
These are all questions that can be clarified, communicated, and tracked with a system known as OKRs. OKRs stands for Objectives and Key Results and it is a framework and process that originated at Intel and was popularized by Google.
Categories of objectives would likely need to include: revenue goals, marketing goals, project milestone goals, and team goals such as hiring and onboarding a new employee. It should be clear who is responsible for accomplishing each key result, and who is on the supporting team to assist the person responsible.
Implementing an OKRs process quarterly can be a great way to get and keep roles and responsibilities clear within a small company. The quarterly cadence ensures that you are reviewing priorities and setting goals frequently enough to adapt to changing market conditions, but not too frequently that you are creating whiplash in the team.
The quarterly process should include reviewing last quarter’s results and setting new key results to be accomplished.
Whoever is responsible for delivering on the key results can then manage their smaller team however they want to, which allows for a certain level of autonomy to accomplish their goals in the way that works best for them. Not all teams need to work the same way.
Structuring the roles and responsibilities around an OKR process like this in a small company often takes the form of a project-based organizational structure rather than a hierarchical organizational structure that attempts to clarify roles for the entire organization. A strict organizational structure, such as a matrix, or hierarchy can restrict and overly complicate a small, creative organization because these structures tend to be less adaptable, and they don’t often map to the reality of the work.
Some resources to help learn about and implement an OKR process:
Youtube video from Cardsmith discussing a visual OKR board, the difference between objectives and key results along with a Kanban execution system to break down key results into a task management system all in one tool. (watch the first 6 minutes)
OKRs template board in Cardsmith (a very inexpensive tool to implement an OKR system for your team).
Great article by niket on Medium explaining the OKR system, why and how to use the OKR framework. 10 minutes reading time.
Video by Google Ventures discussing why and how to run an OKR system. 1 hour 20 min long.
#4 Clarify task ownership in a simple visual system.
There are dozens of project management applications out there, and if you’ve got one that is working, great.
If you don’t have a team task management tool that everyone finds easy and approachable enough to actually use and keep up to date, a simple visual task management system such as a Kanban board might be very useful.
The Cardsmith OKRs video that I mentioned above under the OKRs discussion is actually a hybrid of the OKR framework and a task Kanban which can work really well for a small team. If you aren’t down with doing an OKRs process, you can create a stand-alone Kanban board. For a small team of about 10 people, a single physical board on a wall, or in a visual tool like Cardsmith is sufficient. Keep it simple to keep it useful!
Another, even simpler idea that I’ve used in the past is what I call the whiteboard solution. If you are all in the same office, you can ask everyone to list their top 3 priorities on their whiteboard. The rule is that people work on their top priority item unless they get stuck or pulled away to help someone else. If they are blocked and waiting for help from a team member, a client, or something else, they move to their #2 priority.
If you all are not in the office together you could use a simple visual task management application such as Cardsmith, or Trello, or even a simple Google Doc with sections carved out for each person on the team.