Ross coaches leaders, entrepreneurs, and their teams at Tuesday Advisors. He is the author of Assessing CEOs and Senior Leaders.
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In the past few weeks, I have coached two different executive teams on issues related to conflict about roles and responsibilities on the teams. Interestingly, the conflict in each team's case was arising for opposite reasons.
On the first team, individuals couldn't tolerate others stepping into their lane and meddling in their business. Each time someone tried to pick up work that wasn't "in their lane," conflict ensued. On the second team, nobody knew exactly where their responsibilities started and ended, and so it wasn't clear who was managing which initiatives, when someone should reach out for assistance or even who they should reach out to in the event that they did ask for help.
Almost every executive team has some sort of conflict. A helpful way to think about team conflict is to consider whether it is focused on tasks (What are we doing? How are we doing it?) or on relationships (Who are we working with?). This is useful in thinking about team roles and responsibilities because who is doing what bears the seeds for both types of conflict.
Conflict around team roles and responsibilities tends to be driven by two different, but related, problems: 1) too much role clarity and 2) too little role clarity.
Too much clarity describes situations in which someone does what is so clearly defined that work processes are slowed down because they need to be managed so acutely. There is a cost to boundary spanning and generating cross-boundary communication and collaboration, and people get defensive when they feel like someone is encroaching on their territory.
Not enough clarity describes situations in which individuals don't know where their job starts and stops, and so they don't know when it's their job to step in, how much to engage or who should ultimately be making decisions. This leads to the "if everyone is involved, then no one is to blame" form of dilution of accountability.
What's interesting about these problems is that they vary depending on organization size, lifecycle stage and business needs.
In startups, roles are rarely clearly defined because all hands are needed to get things done and different team members frequently need to step into new roles in order to get things done and continue growing.
In rapidly growing organizations, more structure around roles and responsibilities can be a useful way of freeing up individual capacity by intentionally taking things off of someone's plate so they can focus on activities that best leverage their skill set and expertise. For example, cofounders over time may decide that only one needs to focus on fundraising so the other can focus on operating the business.
As organizations become more stable and operate more based on systems and processes, roles and responsibilities tend to become more solidified. This can be useful because it allows for more scaled effort, but left unchecked, it can also create the problem of silos, decreased communication and lack of collaboration.
Shaking up roles and responsibilities also creates challenges. Whether your organization needs more or less clarity around team roles depends heavily on the organization's lifecycle, the pace of growth and the needs of team members. Some amount of realism is helpful, as well. In very small organizations it may be unrealistic for one person to always own one constellation of tasks, whereas in a very large organization it may diminish innovation and long-term performance by not leveraging the benefits that can come from cross-pollination and shared ways of thinking.
If you find yourself encountering these types of conflict on your team, there are a few things you can do:
1. Conflict around too much clarity may warrant the team spending some time realigning around their ultimate goal. Pulling back from day-to-day work to refresh everyone's vision for what they're working toward and why can be a way of loosening people's grip on their territory. This can also set the stage for collaboration expectations going forward.
2. Conflict around too little clarity may benefit from mapping out skills on the team as well as the team's jobs to be done. Focusing on what the team needs to accomplish in an interdependent way can help identify tasks that may best be pushed down to individuals and those that really do require collective effort. It can also be a way of clarifying where individuals can add the most value and how.
3. In either circumstance, it is helpful for teams to evaluate how their work together is going. Spending some time focusing on how the team is working together can create opportunities to eliminate repetitive effort, can reorient team members' focus and can create space for questioning how things are getting done to make room so that better ways of working together can emerge.
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