Is the lack of role clarity turning your team into a tangled mess of confusion and conflict? In this episode, Gwen Bortner and Tonya Kubo explore why traditional approaches to defining roles often fall short and what you can do instead to create clarity that works. Discover practical strategies for establishing clear reporting lines, defining responsibilities, and ensuring everyone understands their role in the organization. Plus, learn how to address common challenges and maintain role clarity as your business grows and evolves.

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Role Clarity: The Unsung Hero Of Team Productivity And Conflict Resolution

Why does the division of labor in a small business tend to lead to confusion and conflict? If you’ve got a small team, say three or more, you may have already experienced this. If you have a team under 10, you may be wondering why this keeps happening. In this episode, we are going to explore why the traditional approaches to defining roles and responsibilities that many of us have learned as we’ve been building our businesses up often fall short and what you can do instead to create clarity that actually works.

Our topic, Gwen, is one I think causes a lot of frustration. I think it causes lost productivity and even conflict within teams and organizations. While I don’t have a tidy way to summarize it, what I’m talking about is how roles get defined in organizations, the responsibilities that fall within each role, and the risk that I think all of us run in terms of having lines so blurry that team members don’t know where their job ends and another person’s job begins. For the benefit of readers who are like, “Tanya said a lot of words, none of which mean anything in my brain,” Gwen, can you give us an example of what this might look like in an organization experiencing the early stages of success?

The Hidden Danger Of Role-Person Overlap

The thing that we see all the time is we associate a job with a person, particularly when it’s a small organization. Using us, we’re technically an organization of three. The marketing job is your job. You do marketing, but we also have Sophia doing some of the posting that’s associated with marketing. We assume that Sophia’s job is one part of the role and your job is another part of the role. The problem is when we need a fourth person, which luckily, we don’t need right now. At some point, we could. It’s like, okay, so what pieces go where and why? We’ve associated it with people, not with the actual functioning of the role. What’s in the role?

This is a thing that I think most people struggle with because we do associate roles with people. One of the things that I often will have my clients do pretty early on, especially as they’re starting to go through any amount of transition, either growth or shrinkage, because sometimes we have them do one, sometimes we have them do the other is to say, “Let’s stop talking about people. Let’s assume no one is employed and let’s focus on roles.” Roles being what are the things that make sense to go together? Those are the activities that go together as a role.

This is really hard because we do know people, and we know that people are doing things. Separating them out becomes really difficult. I also say, “Include yourself. We know that you’re going to be in the business, but what are also your roles that you’re doing.” In a small organization early on where there’s only 1, 2, 3 people. I think I’ve ever seen this not be true. People are doing multiple roles. It’s the nature. Often, they’re doing roles that wouldn’t necessarily go together, but it’s because they’ve got certain skills that make sense for them to be able to do these multiple roles.

The problem is, as we either replace people or we start growing, we don’t understand how to separate those roles in a logical way because we think of it as Tanya’s job, not the six roles that Tanya actually has. If you were to say, “Gwen, I’m sick of you. I’m leaving, I’m never working with you ever again,” to find another Tanya, I know enough because I pay attention to roles that I probably need to find two people because you do marketing and operations/chief of staff work. Those are not necessarily the same person most times.

I’m going to stop you there and explain why I’m laughing because that is actually the story of my professional life. I have never left a job and not been replaced by at least three people. I have two questions here. Knowing full well that the purpose of our show really is to serve the CEO, the business owner. The woman who is building a rockstar business and feeling stretched to the point of breaking and helping her understand that she can achieve sustainable success. That is the goal of our show. Also, I feel like we need to talk to little Tanya and we need to give little Tanya some coaching here. I also want to know not just how we CEOs prevent that scenario in our business but how we, as service providers, team members, and employees, can avoid being that person. I don’t think it feels good on either end, Gwen.

To me, avoiding being that person is a stronger statement than it needs to be. I think it’s just understanding that you are that person and understanding what that means. Not only do I understand I am that person, but I know what that means. The person who’s hired me also knows what that means because that’s usually where the problem is. When someone hires you and they’re getting 2 or 3 really strong distinctive roles in one body and not understanding that if you’re no longer that body, they may need to hire three people.

Now, they probably don’t need to hire three people each at the same number of hours that you were working. If you’re working 20 hours a week, they don’t need three people at 20 hours. They may need one person at 5, one person at 10, and maybe another person at 7, notice that doesn’t equal 20, because the not having to communicate to yourself shortens the timeframe. You don’t have to tell yourself things. It’s all in your head.

When you get three people, there’s some communication that’s having to go back and forth, which may slow some things down, but also having very distinctive roles may speed some of the things up. There’s pluses and minuses, but I think it’s being really aware what are the roles that any one person is fulfilling so that we can look at them.

Now, the other reason it becomes advantageous is, let’s assume we did some massive growth. I’m not expecting massive growth, but let’s pretend we did a 3x growth this next year. Crazy growth. I am sure you’re the first to say there is no way that you could do all of the things that would be required with 3x growth.

Not that good.

Yeah, because I know you’ve got other clients. You’ve got other things. I totally get that. Part of it is understanding which parts of your roles are we going to completely remove from you and assign to somebody else so that you can still do the things that maybe are your very best uses of your roles. When we’re thinking about it as roles and it’s no longer saying, “Tanya, you’re not good at this.” It’s just like, no, this is just a piece that we’re taking away. It becomes way easier to define it because it’s in a box of this role. One of the things that you do for us is you do onboarding, which I know you enjoy doing. You love getting to know our people and all of those things. If we 3x-ed, I would take onboarding away from you.

That would make me sad.

It would make you sad, but it’s not necessarily our highest best use of you your time and your expertise. As I said, you’re great at it and I love you doing it, but that’s not necessarily the best use of your time. That would be a role I would potentially pull out and give to somebody else. We’d have to find them. That’s a whole another conversation because I know that’s a role that you’re doing. It’s easy for me to pull that out as a separate piece and not look for a Tanya to do that role, but to look for someone who can do those specific activities. I think the place where people struggle is when they’re either growing or shrinking, doesn’t matter which way. All of a sudden, they’re trying to find people that are similar to the people they already have.

Where people struggle is when they are trying to find people that are similar to the people they already have. Share on X

Quite honestly, most of the folks that you bring in, in your early stages of business are a bit unicorny. That tends to be their nature. Often, if you start shrinking the number of roles they have, it’s like, “This is no longer interesting to me.” Sometimes that’s part of what they want. Understanding that that’s also part of what your give and take is, is important to say, “I may have to let this wonderful unicorn person go because what they really liked was doing these eighteen different things. I actually need for people to focus each on these very specific things.”

Startup Culture vs. Sustainable Business Needs

That’s a really good point because I know one of the challenges that business owners face as they’re growing is recognizing that they’re number two. Their very first hire who has been there from day one and has helped them build the business from the ground up is not necessarily the right fit for where they want to go next. One thing I learned about myself when I was working one job full-time was that I’m built for startup culture. The moment the job becomes one of just making sure everything doesn’t blow up, I’m good. What would you say to that?

I think that’s an important distinction. It’s another place that I think folks struggle as they go forward when they’re transitioning in their business because early-stage entrepreneurs tend to hire other people that are also very creative, visionary, flexible, and all of those things. For a business to be long-term sustainable in like 90%-plus of the time, it needs to be what I call boring. It needs to be boring.

It’s like, “This happens, then this happens, and this happens.” Those people are very different people than those early-stage people. They don’t like the boring, like you said. You just described yourself. You don’t like the boring. This is also where the roles being really well defined makes a difference. To say, which boring piece are we pulling out first? Which piece is ready to be boring?

Also, a phase of the whole piece is when you’re growing and developing and starting out, it doesn’t all just instantly become consistent at the same time. It’s little pieces and parts and saying, “This is the role now that we can really do consistently.” We can define it in a way. Often, that means you can bring someone in who actually is at an earlier stage or lower level of experience because they aren’t having to make as many decisions, make as many leaps, or do all of those things. There’s an advantage to it because now you aren’t paying a higher-level person to do a more rote, consistent-level job. Not that they aren’t valuable, not that they’re not good, but the reality is probably that a lower-level person is actually better than the higher-level person because they’re just going to do the thing. They’re not going to try improve it, fix it and modify it.

Break it so they can fix it.

Understanding that role piece then says, “What is that piece I’m pulling out?” What is that piece that I’m pulling out and looking for it? Realizing in some cases, there may be someone in the organization who doesn’t actually have a skill that’s really needed. They may no longer have a role. It doesn’t mean that they weren’t valuable at the time, but they may not be valuable at this stage in the business. That’s hard for all of us because hopefully, we like the people that we’ve hired, that they’re good people, all of those things. It’s back to using your example, you’re a startup person, and so if I release you to go do the next startup, that actually makes you happier than staying in my environment when it becomes a little more boring.

The thing is, is there’s somebody out there that really just wants a boring job. That’s what excites them. What excites them is that they get up every day knowing exactly what the day’s going to hold for them, what time they’re going to have lunch, what time they are going to be able to take a walk around the block. That’s their ideal situation. By not keeping your energized by a startup culture person in that role, you’re actually making space for that other person to find their dream job.

This is a conversation I have often with the CEO. It’s like, “No one’s going to want that job.” No, you don’t want that job. That is like your worst fricking nightmare.” That doesn’t mean there aren’t other people who are Exactly like you said, it’s like, “That is my perfect job. I’m so excited about that job, “because we often project the things that we like as what everyone else should like, and the things that we hate as what everyone else should hate.

We often project the things that we like as what everyone else should like and the things that we hate as what everyone else should hate. Share on X

I had this conversation with one of my clients who is someone I worked with a long time ago and now is back because the business is transitioning again. She realized that she was trying to get one of her good people to do some of the things that she, as the owner, loves to do and is amazing at. That employee’s like, “I don’t really want to do it. I’ll do it if you’re going to make me, but I really don’t want to do it.” At the same point, not wanting to give her the stuff that she hates because she’s like, “No one wants to do this,” and that same employee’s like, “This is so perfect. I totally get it. I love it. It’s really fun to do.” It’s hard for her to imagine that someone could be as opposite as her. However, that’s actually what’s going to take the business to the next level.

How Job Titles Complicate Business Growth

I have one question.

Only one?

No, actually, I have ten, but this is something that when I was thinking about this episode, I was like, “I wonder if this is the problem.” I’m going to ask you and then you can just tell me, “Yeah, that’s a problem. No, that’s not a problem.” I feel like one of the problems that leads us to this situation is that we think of a job as a job and any job in an organization has actually four distinct parts. One part is the title we associate with the job. One part is the rules that are associated with the job. Another part is the responsibilities that fall under the roles. The fourth is actually the job description how we have written this job up and assigned, how we label the roles and responsibilities that fall under it, the percentages that we’ve assigned to various things.

I think sometimes what happens is we create titles in order to justify the amount of money we want to pay somebody or maybe we really like somebody, they have the right skillset. We feel like in order to justify the pay, it has to come with a specific title. The title starts carrying all this weight that sometimes has nothing to do with actually what they come in and or the value they bring to the organization day in, day out. What do you think about that?

I believe that 100%. That comes out of our corporate understanding a business.

Talk about that a little bit more.

We expect the CEO to make more than the vice presidents who make more than the directors who make more than the managers who make more than the, I’ll say, tacticians that are doing things. Somewhere in there is the assistance that are helping the various people. There is this hierarchy that we expect to pay things and it comes out of corporate. It’s part of being able to justify where numbers are and all the rest of it. It comes out of the government. There are all sorts of places. A long history of this. It’s a false narrative for a lot of reasons, but it’s easier for us to understand and our brain links to go with easy. We often do start with title, and then we often put a job description around that that we think matches that title, and then we slot the roles and responsibilities underneath it.

I really want to talk about roles and one of the exercises I’ve been doing for years, and several of my clients do it as well, is I know I’m doing multiple roles on any given day. I give them values in symbolic values of what I call single dollar values, double dollar values, triple dollar values, and quad dollar values. I actually put some numbers to it, but you don’t have to.

I know some of the roles I do are single dollar values. They are not the highest best use of my time, but I also know it’s some of the stuff I need to do. Some of them are double, some of them are triple. A quad dollar is more rare. That’s what I’m really creating huge value. That’s way more rare. Most of my stuff falls in the triple and twos and I track it to make sure that it stays in the triple and double dollar values.

I also know by thinking about my roles in that way, I also know what does it make sense to offload first. If I can offload more of the single dollar values, that probably makes sense if I’m running out of time. That’s a key thing, if I don’t actually have time to do things, and then knowing what are my double dollar values? What are my triple dollar values? For me, customer service delivery is a triple dollar value. It’s one of the last things I’m going to take off of my list. It’s also one of the things that I love most. It is part of my role. Part of my role is customer delivery. It wouldn’t have to be. Other people, that’s not their role. That’s the key thing. Understanding what these roles are is to say, “Is this something that I want to keep? Is it something that I love? Is it something that provides value to me and to the organization?

What these roles are is to say, “Is this something that I want to keep? Is it something that I love? Is it something that provides value to me and to the organization?” Share on X

As I said, there could be someone else who’s like, “The whole customer delivery piece is not the piece that I love. I love the sales piece.” I’m just making this up. They may value that differently. They would hand off that role differently at a different point in time. By thinking in the roles, then we can say where are we actually providing the best value and compensating according to that value that’s really happening and getting less worried about titles.

That makes a lot of sense. To sum up, don’t stress so much about titles. Focus more on the roles and the responsibilities and the job description makes sense within the role. If somebody’s going to have multiple roles, then that needs to be indicated as well somewhere. The reason that needs to be indicated is because the gears get gummed up, don’t they, when we’re not clear on who does what and why they do it, whether they do it because they’re in charge of marketing or they do it because they’re Susie and Susie loves creating designs in Canva, for instance. How else do you think this misalignment of roles, or just say a lack of clarity around the roles that somebody is performing, what other bottlenecks do you think it causes?

The Business You Really Want - Tonya Kubo | Role Clarity

Balancing Tasks Across Multiple Business Roles

It causes huge communication issues as well because if you don’t really understand the roles, then you don’t understand where the roles connect. Using your Susie loves Canva example, they could be a really good resource for marketing and understanding that role may not be her role. Using us, let’s say Susie was part of our team, the marketing role is still yours. You may be using her as a resource, but the role is still yours. That means if there’s anything going on in marketing, I’m still going to you. I’m not going to Susie because you own the role.

You can talk to Susie. Me talking to Susie becomes the communication problem because you don’t know that I’ve talked to Susie and you gave Susie one direction for one thing, and I saw something that I didn’t like. Now, Susie’s changing and you’re like, “Why did you change that, Susie?” The communication piece is the key thing for understanding the roles. Who goes where and why.

The Business You Really Want - Tonya Kubo | Role Clarity

I think also in that same vein with the communication piece, if Susie’s job is not Canva, let’s say Susie’s the project manager for the team and she just happens to be the best designer in Canva the whole company has. She does a lot of support for marketing. When push comes to shove, when it comes to performance evaluations, when it comes to looking at Susie’s body of work, Susie is going to be judged at the project she’s managing and how well she’s doing that piece of her job. Not how well the social media ads performed because of Susie’s amazing designs. When she has to prioritize, the project management has to come first. Marketing doesn’t get to get mad at Susie for not having time for that.

Unless it’s become really clear that part of Susie’s role is Canva design. That’s part of that communication. Yeah, 80% of her job is project management and 20% is Canva design. We will also weight performance in those areas at that level. It allows Susie then to be able to say, “Marketing, you are needing 50% of my time. I don’t have that time based on this allocation.” That allows for marketing to come to CEO and say, “We need more of Susie’s time, or we need to bring someone who is going to be the Canva expert.” We can start evaluating the roles and saying, “I realize we don’t need as much project management. Let’s make it 50/50 for Susie. Let’s check and see,” or, “No, we actually need more of Susie’s time on project management. It is time to bring in a Canva expert.”

At the very least, a design expert. It doesn’t have to be Canva. What you’re really saying, though, is in the communication aspect is everybody in the organization needs to understand what Susie’s role is and about how much time she is allocated for each thing. Susie needs to be aware of it, too. When I worked in higher ed, there were all these directors and they didn’t always talk to each other. I used to say, “Mom, dad said this. I need you guys to talk to each other before you tell us kids what to do,” because the kids don’t know who to listen to.

We think everybody’s direction is on equal footing. Susie needs to know, “This is 20% of my job, which means I get to say, ‘Marketing, this is taking a bigger chunk. Help me prioritize this or help me reconfigure the deadlines.’” Aside from this example that we’re teasing out right now, what would you say are some other signs that a CEO can be looking out for to know whether there’s role confusion in their organization?

Key Signs Of Role Confusion In Teams

The biggest is asking anybody what your roles are. Now they’re going to start telling you their tasks, which is different. Tasks are part of a role. Part of the role is knowing what you’re responsible for. That’s the key thing with role, and this is why I love roles. It’s saying, “What am I responsible for?” I’m still using our same example, because I like it. Susie’s responsible for creating graphics, but she’s not responsible for marketing. She knows where she reports to and who is responsible because the role is clearly defined. She knows that she does not report to me as CEO about her graphics.

Part of the role is knowing what you're responsible for. Share on X

It does start creating an organizational chart, but I don’t think of a role chart and an organizational chart as exactly the same thing. There is crossover and they start creating that in time. If we start with roles, because Susie probably is reporting to the project manager, the senior project manager, or she may be reporting to the CEO. That’s in the true reporting organization piece. Also understanding roles is as soon as she wants to start talking to me as CEO about graphics, I say, “No, that does not come to me. That goes to Tanya. If Tanya has questions, she comes to me.” It really is about making sure that when you ask people what are you doing and who do you report to and who’s responsible for it, they’re really clear about that.

Where are the communication lines and who is responsible? That is really the key thing for the roles. Who is responsible for this piece? Most people don’t know that they’re responsible. That’s where the roles start becoming really clear. When you can define the role, you can say, “These are the things that you’re responsible for.” By defining that responsibility, that allows for way easier, delegation ways, easier definition, etc. My number one clue is when I say, “Tell me about the roles,” and they tell me about the things they’re doing. If they can’t even group them together in logical pieces, it’s like, “You don’t understand that that’s six roles. You see this as one job.” Even if you’re saying, “I’ve got to do this and this,” that’s marketing. “I’ve got to do this and this,” that’s chief of staff. “I’ve got to do this and this.” It’s like, “You’ve got roles.” Very few people can do that.

Step-By-Step Guide To Defining Roles

To help people do that, I think you’ve walked us through the steps that are required to create role clarity in the organization. The first thing you can do if you’ve got a team, if you haven’t started building out your team yet, or if you’ve already started building out your team, you ask everybody what their role is. Before you can do that, you probably should have your own idea of what everybody’s role is, what you believe they’re responsible for. That’s actually step one.

Step two is to ask each individual what their role is so that you can see if you’re in alignment or not. Third is establishing clear reporting lines like if you actually have 5 roles, within those 5 roles, you may not report to all one person. You can’t be the direct line to the CEO. This is what I see in growing organizations. Everybody wants to be the CEO’s direct report. The CEO has a really hard time extricating themselves from that. Finally, it’s defining what you’re actually responsible for. I would say maybe after that is if you’re unsure about that responsibility, who you ask? Does that feel like it captures it?

That totally captures it. Definitely step number one is start with a pretty blank sheet of paper and say, “For the organization to work the way I want, what are the roles that need to be in? How do they group together?” As I said, roles, for me, is about tasks that logically group together.

Keeping Role Clarity As Businesses Evolve

Now I’m going to ask the really hard question, Gwen. Are you ready? We just talked about how you make this happen. How do you keep it in place? How do you maintain clarity as the organization ages and evolves?

It’s actually looking at this on a regular basis, and it depends on how fast things are changing. If they’re changing really fast, you probably need to be looking at it at least quarterly. If they’re at a just a slightly fast pace or normal pace, probably once a year is adequate. Everyone should look at it at least once a year, even if what they come back with is, “No, all is good.” Part of the reason being that the world is changing fast enough. Who would’ve expected there might need to be an AI expert role in businesses a few years ago?

Depending on what your business is and all of that, that could be a role. The person who really understands how to leverage Claude and ChatGPT and all of those things effectively and do the right prompts, could be a role. No one would’ve anticipated that a few years ago as a role. Even if the business didn’t change a lot and the rest of the roles are static, there may be a new role and where does that fall and who uses it and how do you access it and all of those things? At least once a year, really looking at the role chart and saying, “Are there new roles? Are there things that people are doing that don’t fit into any of these roles?” Either do we need to update the role or do we need to add a new role?

What I took away from our episode, Gwen, and I think the last bit was the best bit, almost, is that, first of all, when it comes to role clarity in a growing business, I hate to break it to you, dear reader, but it’s really on the shoulders of you as the CEO to get that ball rolling. Everybody is going to take their direction from you, and even if you’re not comfortable being the boss in this way, you’ve got to be the boss in this way.

When it comes to role clarity in a growing business, it's really on the shoulders of you as the CEO to get that ball rolling. Share on X

You need to sit down and really look at based on what the organization needs, not my personal preference, who I like, what they like doing. I know that our really relationship-focused CEOs love to give people their ideal dream jobs in all the ways. Stepping out of that and saying, “Based on where I want my organization to go down the line, these are the roles that I have or I need. These are the responsibilities that fall under those. These are the people who are performing those.”

Where are our clear reporting lines? Making sure that those are established, even if that means somebody reports to a couple of different people, depending on what role they’re performing. Reinforcing that responsibility, like, you are fully responsible here. This is what responsibility means. To your final point, reevaluating that or revisiting that at least once a year, unless you’re in some pretty rapid growth. Maybe it’s even quarterly. Did I leave anything out?

I don’t believe so. Nice job.

This episode has been highlighting the importance of clearly defined roles and responsibilities in your business, no matter how delightfully tiny your team may be. If clarity is something that you’re looking for more individually or within your business, Gwen and I have something special for you. It’s called From Insight to Impact, and it is our premium weekly email subscription that helps you gain clarity on your business, one reflection at a time. Each Friday, you’ll receive a thought-provoking question designed to help you examine one specific aspect of your business. When you respond, you get personalized feedback to help you implement positive changes that create sustainable, consistent performance across your business. Head over to EverydayEffectiveness.com/impact to learn more.

 

Mentioned In This Episode

 

About Your Hosts

Gwen Bortner has spent four decades advising executives and entrepreneurs in 45+ industries. She helps women succeed in business without sacrificing happiness by identifying their true desires and aligning their business functions. She spots overlooked bottlenecks and crafts efficient plans toward sustainable success that center your values and priorities. Known for her unique approach to problem-solving and accountability through the G.E.A.R.S. framework, Gwen empowers clients to achieve their definition of success without sacrificing what matters most.

Tonya Kubo is a marketing strategist and community builder who helps entrepreneurs build thriving online communities. As co-host of The Business You Really Want and Chief Marketing and Operations Officer (CMOO) at Everyday Effectiveness, she keeps conversations on track and ensures complex business concepts are accessible to everyone. A master facilitator with 18+ years of experience in online community building, Tonya takes a people-first approach to marketing and centers the human experience in all she does.