How to fix unclear roles and responsibilities in your team

Does your team have unclear roles and responsibilities? People end up doing a lot of work, but often it’s work that some people feel they shouldn’t actually be doing.

Sometimes these situations are great. People can jump in and gain experience in varied tasks. This helps your team members develop additional skills. The downside to this is that people who like to avoid work can easily dump that work onto others in your team.

You can improve this situation by clarifying the roles of your team members.

Why unclear roles and responsibilities can be stressful

Unclear roles and responsibilities can be stressful because:

• Your team members don’t understand how they fit into the team, resulting in difficulty in finding that “task significance”. Task significance is the degree to which people feel motivated by being able to see the difference that their job makes.
• People do work that they shouldn’t be or don’t want to be doing
• Team members find it difficult to develop the required skills. Their jobs are not well defined, so it’s hard to tell what skills they need.

In your head, you know what your team members should be doing. However, there is a good chance that other people in the team are confused. This means that clarifying your team members’ job descriptions is a really important step.

How to fix unclear roles and responsibilities in your team

1. Clarify roles in your team by finding the gaps

List the tasks you think your team members should be performing as part of their role. Use their job description as a guide. Now, write down the tasks that they actually are performing. Is there a difference? The difference includes the gaps between their perceived and actual role.

You can see this gap in the chart below. Your job is to fix it!

For each of these gaps, identify who in your team you think should be performing the work.

Remember that somebody else in another team might actually be performing work that your team should be doing. Or, your team might be doing the work of another team.

If the size of the gaps are large, or these gaps are resulting in stress for your team, then you should look at making a change. Use your list of gaps as the starting point to clear things up.

2. Clarify roles in your team by developing a RACI

Consider clearing up unclear roles and responsibilities by developing a RACI matrix to define the roles in the team. RACI is an acronym, which means:

• R = Responsible: A person actually doing the work.
• A = Accountable: A person who will be ultimately held accountable for the work. This is often a manager.
• C = Consulted: A person who should be consulted for their opinion. These people may be outside of your team.
• I = Informed: A person who should be informed of the outcome or progress, but doesn’t need to provide their input.

Create a grid and write a list of the people or roles at the top, and the tasks or functions of the team on the left. In each cell in the grid, you need to put one or more of the RACI letters, as shown below.

A Sample RACI Matrix

Some important things to remember:

• For a given task, you should never have more than one “A”. Only one person should be accountable for something.
• You can have multiple “R” entries for a task. This means more than one person does the work.
• You can have an “AR”, which means that the person who is accountable is also doing the work.
• “C” means that the person doesn’t contribute to doing the work. Instead, you just ask for their input and feedback.

For more information, see this post for an overview of how to create and use a RACI matrix.

Putting tasks in this matrix structure, agreeing them and communicating to your team and others sets the standard for what each person is doing. If you have this formally approved then this can be useful, but even broad agreement is enough to be helpful.

3. Clarify roles in your team by getting feedback

It’s a good idea to openly communicate with your team to validate your thinking when fixing unclear roles and responsibilities. If you feel like your team members need to clarify their roles, then it’s likely they feel the same. Ask your team members for feedback and see whether they feel the uncertainty that you do.

Remember: if the roles in your team don’t seem clear to you, then they probably aren’t clear to others either. Be sure to ask questions and clarify your understanding.

Go and start clearing up the unclear roles and responsibilities, so that everyone can do their jobs well. This will improve performance, result in greater job satisfaction and reduce the ability for others to avoid doing their work.

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Do you have any good ideas for clarifying responsibilities, or stories about when unclear responsibilities were a big problem? Let me know in the comments below!

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