Clarifying Roles

Clarifying Roles

If your team is newly formed, has new personnel, a new leader, or is just in need of new energy, you may want to use the activities below. Although they are presented as a set, you can use them separately as needs emerge:

Team Assessment: Use this assessment to take a critical looks at your team. It should open productive conversation about your team and its direction and needs.
Visioning: Use this activity to articulate your team’s ideal future
Goal Setting: Use this activity to focus your team goals and set a basis for directed action
Building an Action Plan: Use this activity to identify specific actions to begin achieving your goals
Clarifying Roles: This activity will help your team clarify the role of each individual team member.

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Focusing Activity Five: Clarifying Team Roles

Team agreements about individual roles operate like contracts. They make things clear for team members and help focus energy. This is a two-part activity

Part One: Job Responsibilities. Each team member should think about his/her specific job and then identify seven key job responsibilities. Place these responsibilities on the chart below and then complete the matrix as indicated.

Your Job Responsibilities	Rank in terms of importance to your job (1=the most important)	Overall, the percentage of work time you actually devote to this responsibility	Ideally, the percentage of time you feel you should be devoting to this responsibility	A. Does the responsibility fit your skill set? B. Comparatively, do you like doing this responsibility?: 1=no, 2=somewhat, 3=yes
1.		%	%
2.		%	%
3.		%	%
4.		%	%
5.		%	%
6.		%	%
7.		%	%

Part Two: Discussion. Share with the team your completed individual role chart; post them for others to review. Then work to clarify and align team roles and responsibilities by discussing the questions listed below:

Is there any responsibility that is skewing your ability to contribute to team tasks?

As you review the role charts of other team members do you see a responsibility that is “short changed”?

As you review the role charts of other team members do you see a responsibility that is redundant or “overloaded”?

Are you doing something you don’t feel comfortable with while someone else has indicated they like doing it better than you do?

Are there places where responsibilities should be consolidated, exchanged, or eliminated?

Is there too much work being done that doesn’t align or correlate with your identified team responsibilities.

Are there places of conflict?

Are there ways to streamline effort?

As you look at the information on all the charts, how would you restructure your job responsibilities in order to provide greater team support?