Part 14 – Roles and Responsibilities
This post is an excerpt from the How to incrementally improve your Team course
When you complete this lesson, you will be able to
Complete a Roles and Responsibilities template for each team member.
Assign responsibilities and accountabilities for each team member.
Assign ownership for all items and activities under management.
Identify gaps, overlaps and conflicts for items and activities under management.
Content
This lesson clearly defines each team member’s roles and responsibilities. It looks for and removes overlaps, identifies and fills in gaps and makes it clear as to who owns what, who is responsible for what and who is accountable for what.
When team members know what their roles and responsibilities are, how they support the team, and how they contribute to the success and results of the team, this produces greater job satisfaction, commitment, and productivity. Clearly, defined Roles and Responsibilities removes the possibility of conflicts and disputes over ownership, plus they help avoid mistakes being made, they improve decision making by assigning ownership of all items and activities that the team manages. In particular, this also makes it easier for staff to understand whom they should go to when an issue or question arises as everything has an owner. It also identifies who has responsibility for an item and who has accountability for that same item.
Responsibilities are shared, several team members can be responsible for the same item. Accountabilities on the other hand are not shared, only one team member can be accountable for an item. An accountable team member is the owner of the item, they are the person who has decision making authority about the item, they are the person who has the final say about it
During training sessions attendees often want to skip over this lesson, believing it is unnecessary or irrelevant, having little value for them. Fortunately, by the end of the lesson with the completion of the associated exercise, that view is totally reversed with attendees rating this lesson as perhaps one of the most important as indeed it is. Why is this the case?
It identifies ownership of every ‘thing’ that the team manages.
It identifies who the decision-maker is for every ‘thing’ the team manages.
It gives clarity to everyone as to whom to speak to about any problem or question.
It clearly separates team members responsibilities from their accountabilities.
Roles and Responsibilities Template
A Roles and Responsibilities template is completed for each team member. As much information as possible is included and the template can be modified to suit a team’s special needs, it is also very good for identifying things such as where you are lacking back-up roles or knowledge. The template looks like this:
Name.
Position holders name.
Position/Title:
The primary job function such as Infrastructure Manager, Sales Manager.
Performance Goals:
Individual Performance goals or KPIs are included here.
Accountabilities:
Position sole accountabilities, such as staff retention, back-ups, architecture adherence, managed services contract, systems availability, loan approvals, customer refunds.
Responsibilities:
Position shared responsibilities, such as server monitoring, capacity management, desktop repair, router installations, loans, customer accounts.
Second in charge:
Name of the staff member who is second in charge.
Roles:
Roles, titles such as Change Advisory Board chair, business liaison officer, Security officer, Disaster Recovery Coordinator, Loan quality checker.
Ownership:
List the names of processes, how-to guidelines, other documentation, applications and systems for which this person is the accountable owner and decision-maker.
Expertise:
Names of applications, business processes and so on that this person has key knowledge of.
Training completed:
Course names completed.
Training required:
Course names/types yet to be undertaken.
Exercise
1. Fill in a template for your position.
2. Hold a team workshop and compare all of the templates.
Are there any gaps that need filling?
Are there any overlaps that need resolving?
Do any ownership changes need to happen?
Are there any potential conflicts that need resolving?
Are the responsibilities and accountabilities all agreed upon?
3. Finalise each team member template.
4. The completed team member templates should then be loaded on to the Intranet for all staff to reference.
