Pushing for Role Clarity
I am changing direction this week and moving away from looking back at what happened in 2023 and looking forward into what is happening in 2024. This is at the request of a client who has found these missives useful, not for what happened, but for what we see now. So, here is my foray into observations of 2024.
First off, it feels like there is a sea change. The risk aversion and lack of decision-making in 2023 have made way for an action orientation in 2024. Many clients who were waiting to see what would happen have chosen now to set their own path. This is big and, hopefully, it will represent a new spirit in organizations and our nation. (I am speaking to a predominantly Canadian crowd).
What I have seen come up repeatedly lately is not just a recognition of a problem but a desire to solve it. That problem is what I term “role clarity”.
Role clarity is the term we at Forrest use to describe the vexatious problem of being certain of one’s role in the organization in relation to others in that organization.
As observation, when we, as human beings, are unclear on “who” we are in an organization, we behave to position ourselves amongst our peers and co-workers. Sometimes, this goes awry, and it becomes bad behaviour. In other cases, ideally, we try to resolve who we are within the machine of our organizations.
Some of the indicators of an organization that is struggling with this range from:
…to name a few.
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I am a big proponent for trying to ascertain why things happen. (Sometimes that is valuable and, in other cases, it merely represents conjecture and navel gazing.) For those who want to understand a potential cause, however, I suggest you look no further than what we have gone through.
Covid has had, and is likely to continue to have, a profound effect and create changes as we move forward. When we evacuated our businesses in March 2020 we had no sense of what would happen in the long run. Pundits saw it as a glimpse into the future of work, and they may have been right. Regardless, it changed our relationship to work.
What changed was our interrelationship with our work and with others and, while we made do in the height of the pandemic in 2020, it feels like we did not reset when Covid ebbed. This explains the angst and issues that organizations face as they struggle, and continue to struggle, with returning to the office.
Back to the more pragmatic, the real issue is that we see a lack of clarity on our work in countless cases and more frequently than before. Before Covid, we saw that employees needed clarification on what they were accountable for. Managers, in particular, were unsure of their role, and now, almost four years to the day, that has yet to get any clearer.
To compound it now, we are still determining whose job it is anyway. What tasks are we accountable for, and how do our tasks relate to others' roles? This is the crux of the issue of role clarity. We are making assumptions and, when we don’t have clarity, we try to do our best to make sense of it all, but it leads to the list of issues above.
As a result, we see a new need to clarify the work in our clients. Hybrid work has not helped when we can't clarify and collaborate by quickly checking in with each other. Not to be on one side or the other of the debate, but I believe we have not perfected the “lean over the cubicle for clarity” in an age of technology where our schedules are tightly managed.
I look forward to your perspective on this but, if our experience is any indication, role clarity is a hot topic for 2024.
And what specific accountabilities. (Nancy R. Lee, “The Practice of Managerial Leadership,” 2nd ed, p. 83.)
SVP Premium Appliance Brands at Almo Corporation
1 年This is the #1 reason for organizational dysfunction in my experience. The burden is on the leader to clearly delineate roles & responsibilities for their team members. Start with the org chart, redesign if you have to, to eliminate overlap & reinforce clear lines of accountability. If only I had $1 for every org chart I’ve blown up in my career :)
Chief of Staff
1 年I think, during Covid, when work parameters changed, oversight and the concept of managing evolved, and working habits adjusted, roles became muddy. In an effort to appear productive and continuing to add value in role, or due to uncertain attendance by colleagues, many people took on additional accountabilities outside their sandboxes. Remote managerial oversight in the midst of Covid was difficult, so this encroaching went unheeded or was allowed due to the unique circumstances. Post-covid, they haven’t given these accountabilities back or reverted to their defined role parameters, or roles have fundamentally changed by necessity. Now the accountability trading cards have to come out and negotiations need to happen to get back to a clear delineation between roles, and identify those interrelationships again, otherwise, frustrations will abound!