Does your team suffer from unclear roles and responsibilities? Team members end up doing a lot of work, but is it the *right* work or are they wasting time? Are people confused about what they should be doing?
If any of these sound familiar, you can improve this situation by clarifying the roles and responsibilities of your team members.
Why Unclear Roles and Responsibilities Can Be Stressful
Unclear roles and responsibilities can be stressful because:
- Team members don’t understand how they fit into the team, resulting in difficulty in finding that “task significance”. Task significance is what helps people feel like their job makes a difference.
- People waste time doing work that they shouldn’t be doing, or reworking tasks they’ve already completed.
- Team members can’t tell if they are doing a good job. If roles and responsibilities are not well defined, team members struggle to understand what “good” looks like.
- Team conflict is common. Work is forgotten and needs to be done in a rush, or multiple people are trying to do the same work at the same time.
You probably know what your team members should be doing.
However, you need to make sure that everybody is on the same page if you are going to fix these issues and help your team stay motivated.
Learn More: 4 Job Satisfaction Killers That Are Demotivating Your Team.
How to Fix Unclear Roles and Responsibilities in Your Team
1. Clarify Roles in Your Team by Finding the Gaps
Start by listing out the tasks you want your team members to be performing as part of their role. Use their job description as a guide. Hint: If they don’t have a job description, create one!
Now, write down the tasks that they actually are performing. Is there a difference? If so, this is the gap between the role you need them to play and what they are actually doing.
You can see this gap in the chart below. Your job is to fix it!
For every gap you find, identify the role that you believe should actually be performing the work.
Remember that somebody else in another team might actually be performing work that your team should be completing. Or, your team might be doing the work of another team which takes focus from their own jobs.
If the gaps you find 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 have some conversations and clear things up.
Seeing Performance Issues In Your Team? Try These Things.
2. Clarify Roles in Your Team by Making a RACI
Consider clearing up unclear roles and responsibilities by developing a RACI matrix to define the roles in the team. RACI stands for:
- R = Responsible: The person actually doing the work.
- A = Accountable: The person who will be ultimately held accountable for the work, or approve it. This is often a manager (probably you).
- C = Consulted: A person who should be consulted for their input. These people may be outside of your team.
- I = Informed: A person who should be informed of the outcome or progress of the work, but they don’t really get a say in how the work is done.
Create a table 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 entry in the table, you need to put one or more of the RACI letters, as shown below.

Important Notes For Fixing Roles and Responsibilities With Your RACI Matrix
- Each task should only have one “A”. Only one person should be accountable for something. Hint: If everyone is accountable, nobody is accountable!
- You can have multiple “R” entries for a task. This means more than one person actually performs the work.
- You can have an “AR”. This means that the person who is accountable is also doing the work.
- “C” is for consultation only. This means the person doesn’t perform the work. Instead, you just ask for their input and feedback.
- Try not to have too many “I”s. There is a temptation to inform everybody about everything, but you should concentrate on the people who really need to know.
Putting tasks in this RACI matrix structure, agreeing them and communicating to your team and others sets clear expectations for what your team is doing.
3. Clarify Roles in Your Team by Getting Feedback
It’s a good idea to openly communicate with your team to test 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 get away with avoiding work!
Listen to the Podcast: Episode 35: How to Create Open Communication in Your Team.
4. Clarify Unclear Roles and Responsibilities by Tracking Your Tasks
When we don’t have a clear idea of what our teams are working on, things can get confusing. Make sure you’re able to track the work of your team in some way.
This may be using a system or even a simple spreadsheet. Whatever you choose to use, make sure you can monitor progress and keep an eye on the different work happening in your team.
Meeting with your team frequently and discussing their current workload is a great way to spot unclear roles and responsibilities, where there may be overlaps between team members or even other teams.
The starting point to fixing unclear roles and responsibilities is knowing about them, so make sure you have the right oversight of the work in your team!
Learn More: How to Get Comfortable Without Controlling Leadership.
When Fixing Unclear Roles and Responsibilities, There Is No Silver Bullet
Sometimes you will work to clarify roles and responsibilities and people will still be unhappy. You will create a RACI and set expectations but you’ll still see conflict and people will keep asking for clarity on roles.
If this is a recurring issue in your team or organisation, there is a good chance that bigger problems are at play. In my experience, this is often because people are scared of being blamed, they feel threatened or they are not happy with the role that they are playing.
You might need to have some direct conversations to set expectations and work through the issues. Unfortunately, there is no “one size fits all” solution!
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I just stumbled on this blog on leadership and got so challenged with the enriching insight on leadership clarification that make team development fulfilling. Thank you
Thank you very much for your comment – I appreciate it.
And I’m glad you are getting some value from the posts!
Ben
Thank you!
You’re welcome!
Really good stuff; brief and clear
Thanks for the comment Richard, appreciate it.
Ben
I found your article very useful. Thank you!
Within our firm, our roles and responsibilities have become blurred/confused. Our president has often assigned responsibilities to people based on their competence and trustworthiness, but these responsibilities have come to be outside out the departments as we’ve grown.
We are looking to have someone come and help us clear up who should be doing what, and prepare job descriptions that all the invested parties agree to and will be kept accountable to.
Do you know what the name of the service and the title of the consultant are that we’re looking for?
Thanks,
Babak
Hi Babak,
It sounds to me like you’re looking for an Organizational Development Consultant. Generally they have skills and experience relating to Human Resource management, organizational structures and capability development. The mixture of those three domains should be able to help you.
Thanks for your comment and good luck on clarifying your situation!
Cheers,
Ben
I’ve been struggling with being in a role that is unclear to me and my peers. Thank you so much for this article! It’s very insightful and will help me start a conversation with my boss on taking steps to resolve this.
You are welcome – I hope you make some progress to clarify your situation!
Ben
Great article – thank you! For several years, our team was very demotivated, conflicts between team members were the “normal” and turnover was way higher than for the rest of the company (great company, btw!). We kept saying we needed “swimlanes/job descriptions and roles clarified but our manager said she did not want to “confine” us. Recently she left the company and wow – what a difference – within a few weeks we had clarified our roles and responsibilities, gotten expectations from upper management clarified and have a highly motivated, excited, quickly developing team! Clarification of roles and responsibilities is critical – possibly more impactful than raises or bonuses! We’ve completed the “RA” part of the chart on our own, but I love the RACI chart for us to continue to improve the clarity of our multi-faceted projects and responsibilities, so will definitely use that as a next step for our team – thank you!
Thanks for sharing your experience Faye.
Roles and responsibilities are a really important foundation. Once they are in place and people start to become comfortable with how the team is working, I usually find that everyone relaxes and becomes more collaborative, helping each other get the work done rather than arguing over the RACI :)
So use the RACI to set a basic foundation, but then don’t be scared of flexing roles a little when you need to!
Cheers,
Ben