Clarifying Roles & Responsibilities
A CREW TOOL: COMMITTMENT & DIRECTION
Clear job descriptions don’t always eliminate confusion over roles and responsibilities within a team, especially in a small organisation. Clarity on who is accountable and responsible for any given task will minimise delegation issues and conflict within the team.
Purpose
This tool helps team members clarify roles and responsibilities within the team.
Typical scenarios
- Confusion about roles and responsibilities within the team or within a project
- Delegation needed to open up time for the leader
- Re-allocation of roles and responsibilities within the team
- Confusion over decision-making authority
Why this is important
Setting clear job descriptions does not always erase confusion over roles and responsibilities within the team. Some things still fall between the cracks due to confusion about who is accountable and responsible for certain team tasks. Additionally, confusion often arises in decision-making authority. When can someone run with things and make a decision and when do they need to let the leader make the decision? These confusions bring forth delegation issues and conflict within the team. This tool aims to clarify roles and responsibilities within the team.
The process
Steps for clarifying roles and responsibilities
The Decider: The person is liable for the success or failure of the task; has final decision-making authority
The Champion: The person with the most drive, passion and time to move the task forward
The Doer(s): The person(s) who execute most of the work to complete the task
The Consultant(s): Any person(s) who provide necessary input (often expertise)
The Informed: Any person(s) who don’t need to be included in every detail, but need to be kept in the loop
Drafting and updating job descriptions is a good place to start in clarifying roles and responsibilities. A good job description assists an employee to focus on their key roles and responsibilities. The limitation with a job description is that it is not all encompassing. Grey areas within team roles and responsibilities are bound to appear as new team challenges arise and as team tasks complexity increases. Also, grey areas can arise when sub-tasks overlaps within someone else’s domain.
Before jumping in and explaining the tool, let’s first look at another point of confusion… Confusion often arises in the understanding of what is meant by the “responsible” or “accountable” person on a given task. Will this be the person who is ultimately liable for the task? Is the leader not always the responsible person? Is this the same person who will drive the task forward? Is this the same person who will do most of the work? This tool will come in handy to clarify these terminology confusions as well.
When there are more than one person needed to complete the task, the two most important roles to clarify on a particular task is the person who decider (the person who makes the final call) and the person who champions. This can be the same person, but as delegation becomes necessary, the need to split the decider from the champion becomes necessary:
- Decider: person who is liable, who has decision-making authority
- Champion: person who champions the task
Before jumping to step two of the model, we first need to have a deeper look at the complexity of the split between these two roles, a complexity which is often nestled in the complexity of delegation.
The team leader usually has the ultimate decision-making authority, but the team leader needs to delegate this authority as much as possible since this will open up time for the leader to spend time on more crucial activities. The team leader thus need to understand the complexity of delegation.
Delegation has 4 stages. It moves from a stage where I champion and I decide (stage 1) to a stage where you champion and you decide (stage 4). The more you move through the stages, the more time is saved by the team leader, and the more control (decision-making authority) is ceded to others.
When a manager needs to apply which stage:
- Stage 1 – I champion, I decide. I have the most know-how and the task carries too much risk for me to delegate the task.
- Stage 2 – You champion, I decide. You have more (or enough) know-how and passion to drive it forward, but I still carry too much risk to cede decision-making authority.
- Stage 3 – I champion, you decide. I have the most know-how so I will champion it along, but I want to give it to you as early as possible for you to make the final call on things.
- Stage 4 – You champion, you decide. I trust you enough to take the task forward and have decision-making authority.
As you can see in the above model, the team leader is not necessarily the decider of every task. On top of that, if a leader is able to delegate more to others, it will increase the buy-in from the team. For delegation of decision-making and championing to increase, trust needs to increase. See the Building Trust tool on how to build trust. The difficulty in delegation still comes in choosing who decides and who champions:
How to choose who champions:
- This is the person who has the most drive, passion and time to champion the task forward.
- It is often the person who has the strongest team relationships to know who to pull in and what roles each person needs to play.
- It is often the person who can drive the process forward to make sure things get done.
- It is often the person who reviews the quality of the task (although an expert could be pulled in to conduct the reviewer role).
How to choose who decides:
- This is the person who has decision-making authority to make the final call.
- The person whose head is on the line if something goes wrong – the culpable person.
- This is mostly the person who carries the most risk in the success of the task – the liable person.
- This should preferably be the person who has the bigger picture in mind.
If more than two people are needed to complete a task or if the previous step was not sufficient enough to clarify roles and responsibilities, your team needs to move to step two: Clarifying the Doer, the Consulter and the Informed.
- Doer – person(s) who does most of the work to complete the task
- Consulter – person(s) who provides necessary input (often expertise)
- Informed person(s) – person(s) who does not need to be included on every detail, but needs to be kept in the loop
The person who champions (drives things forward) is sometimes different to the person who does most of the work, hence the distinction between the champion and the doer. More than one person could be assigned these above-mentioned three roles. Take note that some tasks do not need a Consulter or an Informed person, but clarification on these roles assists the team to know who to involve and keep in the loop on the particular task.
While most roles and responsibilities have been assigned in your team, you probably still have grey areas that need attention. Use the spreadsheet template to clarify these grey areas.
Clarifying Roles & Responsibility Sample Spreadsheet
| TASK | STEP 1 (one of each) | STEP 2 (as many as needed) | |||
| Decider | Champion | Doer | Consulter | Informed | |