Be Passionately
Curious

MAKE SURE YOU HAVE THE RIGHT PERSON IN THE RIGHT ROLE.

When things seem to fall through the cracks or people are pointing fingers and blaming others, you may benefit from reviewing how you have documented and communicated the roles and responsibilities to your team.

The roles and responsibilities template tied what each role did and how they did it, to why they did it. This range of clarity from why, to how, and what reminded me of Simon Senik’s Golden Circle. With a common why, how they did it had purpose behind it and what they did made it tangible.

What to do:

1. Make a list of all of the roles in the company. If one person wears a lot of hats, list each hat they wear as a distinct role. If you have a current company org chart, you may be able to reference it.
2. Pull together 1-3 people from each role, a team or a department to collaborate on this exercise.
3. Start by reviewing the template from top to bottom. You may choose to put the company’s mission, vision, or BHAG at the top for all roles or establish something considering the context of the role and the part it plays in supporting the company in achieving its shared goal.
4. Choose one to do collaboratively together to make sure everyone starts with the same understanding of the template before filling out their role. A company having a shared understanding of meaning is more important than sharing the interpretation that I or another company may have about how to complete the template.
5. Each role completes their own template about their own role.
6. Each role then shares what they documented, and others can share ideas to add, edit or remove.
7. As you hear what everyone else did, you may have ideas to tweak what you did; go ahead and refine it.
8. You may choose to put these into use immediately, or have someone whose role it would be to ensure accuracy and consistency. 
9. If any changes were made, review them, and make sure everyone in the company knows where they can find them for easy reference, and how to update them as needed.
10. You may use this tool when posting open positions and recruiting new team members, onboarding new people, or annual reviews where everyone has a chance to refresh their memory or suggest updates to improve both the communication and systems of the organization.