How to Reorganize Roles and Responsibilities in Your Team to Prep for Hiring
Episode 486: Show Notes
In today’s episode, we are going to talk a bit about reorganization and what it looks like to really get clear on the roles and responsibilities of your team members inside your business. We will talk about how you might do this as a way to clean up and get your head straight before you go through a hiring process.
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We have probably made every mistake in the book when it comes to hiring and have learned a lot over the last few years as we have expanded our team. We have come from every end of the spectrum when it comes to hiring a team – having a big team, a small team, no team, contractors, and everything in between!
Our Evolving Approach To Hiring and Some Key Influences of Ours
When it comes to hiring, the key thing is to find a solution that works for you. Each time we changed our team we learned valuable lessons about what type of team we need. Hiring is really a growing pain and the lessons you learn along the way are worth all the money it costs. Taking on new staff is a leap of faith. You can get away with being a one-person team for only so long and eventually you’ll need to start hiring. Last year we scaled back a lot and really started trying to base the value of our employees directly on the ROI they generated, and this season we have held back with reckless hiring, choosing to rather adopt a philosophy of waiting. We are happy we did this because we got some amazing coaching that helped us lay some new foundations with how we approached hiring. A while back we read the book Traction which helped us in many ways but some of the exercises and paradigms in it did not suit our business. The three and five-year plan concept was not a good match. However, the exercises about structuring meetings helped a lot. When it came to outlining a team structure, the exercises in the book were helpful to a point but what they missed was a focus on the need to get very clear about specific roles that staff members need to fill. This was one of the incredible things leadership coach Alyssa Bloom taught us, and we have to give her credit for many of the lessons we go through today.
How to Set Clearly Defined Roles for Your Team Members
Our big mistake when it came to defining roles was that we would hire for a role and then realize there were new responsibilities outside of that role which we would then assign to that same person. As this process continued, the person would become overloaded and stop doing the things they were originally hired for. What we learned from Alyssa’s role setting exercise was the need to clearly define all roles first, and then find people to fill them. The first step is to brainstorm all the roles that are needed to run the business. Put that into a matrix where you figure out what department each role should live in. Then think about what responsibilities come with each role. After that, you come up with a rubric for defining success in that role. This last piece is important because you can get a very clear idea of what the person needs to accomplish in order for them to do their role properly, and know when to put corrective action in place. The last piece is about determining what the desired results of a person’s role are. If an employee is filling their role properly but the desired results which that role is intended to produce are not being met, then the process of redefining the role so the desired results are achieved becomes the next step. When you map the role setting process out in this way, you’ll start to see how your business is less organized than your map – the roles you start setting will clash with what is actually going on. For us, what we did was map everything people were currently doing and then make a second map which was an ideal version of the roles that made up our business. If we found what we considered key activities in our ideal version, we would then reassign a team member to that activity. This gave us a clear idea of who is sitting in which seat, what the expectations are, helped us encourage a team member to take ownership of their roles, and assisted us in setting up a catalyst to identify where things are missing. Before doing this exercise, we had an approach that would take things as they came but something always felt off, and now that feeling has gone away. In the past, we were not so clear about what a certain role actually involved, but now we have learned that if you have a baseline of tasks and expectations and something to measure these against, things become much more streamlined.
Getting Everybody Involved in Strategy Using a Culture of Ownership
A big piece that is still missing in this process for us is the part where we give our team members a true sense of ownership of their roles. That is the part of the process which encourages team members to empower themselves with creative ways of accomplishing the goals defined by their role. We have for many years now been the only people in the company who were responsible for strategizing for every department in the business – an exhausting activity! But this does not mean that our team at Boss Project is bad, but rather that we have not created a culture where the team felt empowered to take initiative and assume a strategic approach to each of their roles because they did not feel they truly owned them. We had not gifted our team with the ownership of their roles! This is not something we are upset about, rather feel that it is an exciting new phase for the business. We are so pumped up about taking our team into a place where everybody is strategizing, not just running departments according to strategies coming from the top down.
Implementing the Findings of the Role Setting Exercise in Your Team
How do you take this information, communicate with your existing team, identify missing pieces, and then hire strategically? If you have serious fires you need to put out and this requires an immediate hire then, of course, you must do that. If not, the first thing to do is think about who on your existing team is in what role. After that, you want to develop a job description for each person, not each role. Then have a conversation with that person, tell them their new baseline expectations, and give them a sense of ownership of this position. This way you permit that person to creatively strategize about how best to achieve their goals. After doing this, you’ll notice that there will be missing pieces in your business – roles you have identified that are not being filled. Now you need to get clear on which roles absolutely need to be filled and how you might fill them with a new hire. Before starting the hiring process, the last thing you need to do is make a budget with your current average monthly income. Having a clear idea of what you can afford is essential before you start thinking about bringing on a new person in a permanent capacity, and all of these decisions will depend on the size of your business.
Tips for Making the Hiring Process More Streamlined
We did this exercise in our own business, and the whole point of us doing it was because we needed to hire to fill a new role. Before hiring for the new role we had defined, we created a clear job description based on the role we needed the new person to fill. We created a hiring process to make sure the new team member had the skills in the areas we required. We realized the need to get clearer on how to ask questions when interviewing. During previous interviews, we would go a lot on our gut feeling about the personality of a prospective employee but now we were far more concerned with the question of whether they had the exact skills to fill the role we required. In some of our last application processes, we got so many applications and ended up spending ages sifting through them to find the good ones. This time we asked for recommendations so that we got a batch of much higher quality applications. It only took us about 40 minutes to go through them all and use a system where we checked if an application ticked three checkboxes which would decide whether they would make it to the next interview round. To wrap this episode up, we want to say that if you are trying to be clear on the roles and responsibilities of your team, do this exercise. It can set you up for success if and when you decide to hire, and if nothing else it’s going to allow you to have clear conversations with the people that are already on board about what you want. This exercise was so helpful to us and we know it will add clarity for you and your business. Good luck!
Quote This
You want to get a really good look at what your current team is doing and be more clear on what you want and expect from people.
Highlights
Our Evolving Approach To Hiring and Some Key Influences of Ours. [0:04:31.1]
How to Set Clearly Defined Roles for Your Team Members. [0:12:05.1]
Getting Everybody Involved in Strategy Using a Culture of Ownership. [0:30:43.1]
Implementing the Findings of the Role Setting Exercise in Your Team. [0:36:10.1]
Tips for Making the Hiring Process More Streamlined. [0:42:44.1]
ON TODAY’S SHOW
Abagail & Emylee
The Strategy Hour Podcast
We help overwhelmed and creative entrepreneurs break down their Oprah-sized dreams to create a functioning command center to tame the chaos of their business. Basically, we think you’re totally bomb diggity, we’re about to uplevel the shiz out of your business.
KEY TOPICS
Roles, Responsibilities, Teams, Ownership, Hiring
