Setting Clear Roles & Responsibilities

As a leader, a large part of your role is ensuring your employees are clear on what they need to do and how to do it successfully. When roles and responsibilities are clear, employees understand, respect, and value the unique contributions of one another. Clearly defined roles and responsibilities help team members recognize that the overall success of the team is a function of shared responsibility, ownership, and accountability.

“Role clarity,” defined in one study as “the degree of understanding people have of their roles, responsibilities, and processes at work,” is essential for better performance. Employees who have greater clarity around their roles and responsibilities have been shown to have higher levels of effectiveness, productivity, engagement, and job satisfaction.

HOW TO CREATE CLARITY TO FUEL AUTONOMY

To gain the necessary alignment, you can utilize our “Role and Goals Template” that will ensure everyone is on the same page around what’s expected.

Roles and Goals Instructions are designed to help you create clear performance objectives for each member of your team, so that they are clear about their primary areas of responsibility and facilitate a conversation about how they can achieve the stated goals.

Use the Role and Goals Template for someone whom you manage on a daily basis. Try to choose an employee who is:

• Struggling and would benefit from this clarity of expectation.
• Someone that you see growing in the organization.
• An employee that you deem to be high potential and you hope to maximize that potential.

To gain the necessary alignment, you can utilize the Role and Goals Development Plan that will ensure you are setting goals and developing them in the most important areas for their growth. This template is designed to help you create clear development objectives with the members of your team based on their most important areas of responsibility.

• The first two columns should be identical to those on the Roles and Goals template.
• The third column should include specific examples of times when this employee met or exceeded expectations in that area.
• The fourth column should include specific examples of a time that the employee did not meet expectations in that performance area.

Using our tools to help consciously define each person’s role, their responsibilities, and success criteria within the team can have a positive impact.

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