Our impact

Unlocking individual and team effectiveness through role clarity

Ensuring roles – and relationships between roles – across the team are clear so that everyone is focused on the right activities, working collaboratively and drawing on strengths.

The Challenge

We were invited to assist the leaders within a utilities organisation in lifting wellbeing, engagement and performance across their teams after significant structural changes over an extended period.  The need was to bring greater clarity of roles and responsibilities, address excessive workload and improve inter and intra-team relationships.

Our Approach

The intent of the work was to build each team member’s clarity of their role through a conversational approach that enhanced the collective understanding of how the team delivers value.

Taking a ‘learning by doing’ approach, we ensured leaders were positioned to lead the work, by agreeing roles and responsibilities, building leaders’ familiarity with role clarity concepts, then co-designing the approach (including agreeing the guiding principles of the work).  Leaders had access to advice, guidance and materials through team and one-on-one forums.

Team leaders were tasked with leading the role clarity conversations with team members, as well as exploring inter-team role relationships.  Intentionally taking an iterative approach meant the leaders were attuned to picking up both predicted and unexpected issues (such as changes to team membership). They were then positioned to explore and resolve clarity issues as they arose, adapting the plan over time.

At this point in time, the team leaders are focused on addressing the following critical issues:

• How to maintain shared understandings in a changing context?
• How to integrate with other key people systems?
• How to keep necessary documentation to a workable minimum?

The Impact

The project will conclude once the role clarity conversations (both one-on-one and intra-team) are complete and role expectations are appropriately documented.  Having set a new standard in actively addressing role clarity issues, these leaders are now better positioned to confidently and respectfully explore and agree role expectations in a timely way.  This will benefit them, and their team members, in current and future roles.

We predict that these critical leadership skills will become more important in organisations experiencing ongoing change.