In my time leading and coaching teams and individuals, I’ve found that one of the most common sources of tension is misaligned expectations between individuals. These gaps in expectations often turn into dysfunction later on – silent blame that builds up and surfaces in a big way every few months (or years!), or ways of working that are ineffective because a group is working around an unspoken expectation of one individual.
Within this domain of expectations are ”roles and responsibilities”, which are often revisited in organizations with the intention of improving collaboration, but which can bring additional challenges – as they relate to an individual’s identity, their status and opportunities within an organization, and their trajectory beyond it. Individual preferences also come into play – some people are comfortable with ambiguity or autonomy in where they should focus and where their boundaries are, some people want to know exactly what is expected of them, and some people just want to ensure nothing “falls through the gaps” within their team.
I’ve tried several of the more popular techniques to improve alignment in this area – RACI charts, delegation boards/poker, role chartering, etc. – and although many are useful in certain contexts, I’ve found that they generally start from somewhere in the solution space: peoples’ responsibilities, or “the work they currently do”. I know it sounds weird to point out that one problem with these approaches is delivering what they are meant to, but stay with me for a couple more paragraphs…
At one of my previous studios, we were trying to sort out focus areas for a set of “vertical” operational roles (CEO / Studio General Manager / Production Director / Producers), in an attempt to reduce how often we would accidentally override each others’ decisions. At one point the CEO said something profoundly simple – “When I come into the studio each day, I’m asking myself three simple questions: do we have the right culture, do we have the right talent, and are our overall priorities clear? That’s it.” The group talked about this more – “What do each of us actually think about on a regular basis? How does this drive our work and priorities?”. This led us to ultimately frame our roles as “What questions are we each trying to answer?”, which led to a realization:
There is an opportunity space, upstream from the current work, which is often explicit when roles are first created (i.e. job description), which then become implicit when someone fills the role, and often become more vague over time.
The actual responsibilities – who greenlights a project, who organizes sprints, who approves a design, who decides it’s OK to release an update – are actually just the current solution space, sitting downstream from the opportunity space. And it’s often a solution space that has been copied and pasted over and over, studio to studio, and reinforced by standardized titles, job descriptions, processes, and mistaking one context for another.
This makes it much harder to revisit that opportunity space and find new approaches or role configurations that are more effective.
Here’s what those last few paragraphs look like:
We came away from that conversation with a new approach to roles and responsibilities, one that starts in the opportunity space, which I’ve continued to experiment with and evolve with different studios and teams. Thanks to Cynthia Quek, an agile coach colleague of mine, it also has a nice name – “Share of Mind”.
Groups I’ve used it with have found varying levels of outcomes and value. Some simply get insight into what’s on their colleagues’ minds, or what their work focuses on, similar to “Welcome to My World” team exercises. Others have leveraged it to sort through and refine gaps and overlaps in their roles, similar to my original story above. Taking it further, some groups have used it to identify roles that are taking on too much or too little, or as a foundation to revisit the list of current responsibilities or map it into another method like RACI.
Here’s the exercise the way I tend to run it; note that I’m not a big fan of spreadsheets, especially for group facilitation, but in this instance I’ve found it’s much less work than using physical or digital post-it notes during the “merging” step.
- Decide the breadth and depth of roles that should participate in the exercise, based on where there seems to be confusion in responsibilities, overlaps, gaps or a sense of unmet expectations. It doesn’t need to be limited to a peer team – as in my story, it’s possible to include vertical “hierarchical” roles.
- Ask everyone to silently/separately list all of the questions they think of when doing their work, with a “Goldilocks lens”. For example, “What should the product be?” is probably too vague, “What parameters should be required when instantiating an animated button?” is too granular, but “What should go into our next iteration?” is probably about right.
- Create a combined pool of all questions, merging obvious duplicates, splitting or clarifying questions that are too big or vague, etc. and create a column for each role or person (this is where I recommend a spreadsheet is used). For example:
- Looking at the full pool of questions as a group, ask everyone to once again note which questions they think of (the larger pool may give them new insights), and the share of cognitive load each takes, relatively speaking – high (it takes a lot of their mental bandwidth), medium, low, or none. It’s important that people are honest, rather than indicating what they assume others think they should be focused on. Similar to building an initial kanban board – it’s most useful when it represents reality rather than the ideal.
- Merge this into a single sheet to create a heat map. Example:
- Review it as a group and share insights. I typically use an approach like Circles, or if that feels too structured, just a basic round-robin with higher-power-dynamic roles speaking at the end of the round. Here’s a few lenses I’ve found useful:
- What general insights does this view bring? Do you see anything that wasn’t obvious or surfaced before?
- Does anyone have too much on their mind? (perhaps the Dev lead in this example!). This might be creating cognitive overload, too much context-switching, or even resentment towards a role they expect to be more present in this area.
- Do any questions have too few people thinking about them? Does it feel like things are falling through the cracks in this area?
- Do any questions have too many people thinking about them? Is this a healthy aspect, i.e. team culture of shared ownership, or ineffective? Does it indicate an opportunity for deeper change?
From here, you can extend the exercise based on the interests of the group. You can discuss any potential changes the group might make, again using a format where everyone gets a chance to speak, and power dynamics are lessened or removed. You can map the questions into the current responsibilities or activities of the group (i.e. which activity attempts to answer which question), or translate it into another structure the organization uses like role charters or RACI (i.e. perhaps Medium and Low implies a Consult or Inform). I’ve also seen teams connect the “responsibility” portion to their current processes or artifacts, acknowledging that there is often not only a decision component, but an alignment or communication component as well.
I’ve also experimented with adding questions from domain experts outside of the group, which can help add “unknown unknowns” in the larger, merged list of questions.
I hope this practical exercise has generated some new thoughts around roles and responsibilities, or perhaps the wider opportunity vs. solution space of whether to hire someone and make them responsible for decisions, or spread them out amongst existing roles or individuals.
Feel free to email me if you give it a try, or have any questions!
