Right now is an excellent time to get real clarity on role responsibilities in your company. This is your opportunity to figure out how to create the high performing team you need. You have to see the world and your team in a different way to survive and thrive in business as you whether the pandemic and its inevitable economic shifts.
- Get clarity on who has responsibility for what (including yourself)
- Set expectations for success in each position
- Drive toward self-accountability for you AND your team
- Design your hiring process to get what you need from day one of interviews
You’ll have a competitive advantage for talent acquisition and business fulfillment when this COVID chaos shifts and hopefully subsides to more order in 2021.
Who Is Responsible For What
To get clarity in your organization and build a baseline for accountability in every employee, get clear that a position or a title is just a name for a set of roles, not a list of tasks and duties. Think of a role as a high level view and agreement for an area of responsibility.
What roles are being held in this current chaos by your team?
Remember a position like COO likely has 4-6 roles and a position like President or CEO can have as many as 8 or 9 roles depending on the size of your company.
Set Expectations for Success
Success in each role or some combination of roles can be measured in many ways. Each individual with a set of roles will be more effective if they set up metrics for gaging their own success. A metric like “customer satisfaction” can start with anecdotal evidence – what a customer says after the delivery of a milestone. Or more concrete and measurable, what a customer responds on a 3 question survey to rate the service or product.
Set metrics for success for each position (and its associated roles). Defining which measurements indicate success will allow everyone to check in and adjust when goals for metrics are not being met.
Especially in this time of chaos, “success” may shift from week to week. Just be clear what your definition and measurement of success is and set/reset expectations as you need. You must be talking to one another to do this.
As a Team, Drive Toward Self-Accountability
Share your interpretations and expectations with your employees and they will better be able to measure their own success, report it to you, and suggest changes to improve performance for themselves. In a well run operation, self-accountability is the larger part of what affects efficiency and effectiveness.
A simple practice of asking, “Do you think you are on track to hit your metrics?” and “If not, what can I do to help.” Will increase the instance of an employee coming to you with issues and solutions they plan to implement and respond, “Yes, yes I am on track to hit my metrics for success this month!”
In times of chaos it will help everyone to have a quick team stand up in which each person shares their metrics and their performance and requests help with issues if they need it. What a great time to reinforce great behavior by sharing.
Design a Hiring Process
These are the most commonly made mistakes:
- The right people aren’t being involved in the hiring process
- The whole hiring team doesn’t know exactly what they are looking for
- There’s no consistent process for revealing a good fit
- There’s too much of a gut call when the decision is finally made
There’s a lot to learn in how to hire effectively as a company. It’s likely that you are not just making one of these mistakes, but some combination of most of them. High performing teams are so much easier to build and lead if you hire well from the get go.
What’s Next
Tap into this free resource and ask whatever questions you’d like regarding high performing teams, hiring processes, and role clarity in an open clinic. Choose to attend any of the open clinic Ask THE (The Hire Effect™) Expert sessions, on Thursdays from noon-1 p.m. Just register, bring team mates if you like, and get the help you need.
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Miche Rayment is the Founder and CEO of The Hire Effect™. Users of The Hire Effect system get access to organizational development experts to build high performing teams no matter what the market looks like. TheHireEffect.com