by Alison Green
CREATING MEANINGFUL ROLES
Managers often define their staff members’ roles in ways that use those staffers as helpers to the manager rather than giving them roles with real ownership. This leaves the manager bearing most of the emotional weight of ensuring the work is successful, including spotting what needs to be done and assigning the work, and leaves staff members feeling that they’re responsible only for fielding the specific tasks the manager assigns.
This dynamic typically develops because managers craft roles that don’t fully capture their expectations of what a great employee would do in the job. Instead, they tend to focus on specific activities like, “Check our inventory of supplies each month,” instead of saying, “You’re responsible for making sure everything runs smoothly.”
By carving out more meaningful roles, you can transfer much of this weight and avoid having to identify, delegate, and manage every task that comes up. If you shift the weight of a role over to the staff member who holds that role, she should be the one responsible for obsessing over details and progress and driving the work forward, making her role more fulfilling and leaving you the time to focus more attention on other things (Figure 3.1).
FIGURE 3.1. Handing Off Broad Responsibilities
To be concrete about this, one option is to create a one-page description of the role that considers both what the staff member should do and how she should approach her work:
The what: Each person on your team should be able to say what she is fundamentally responsible for. The traditional way to lay this out is in a bulleted list of responsibilities and tasks (in other words, a job description), ideally grouped in some logical way. This can be a very helpful way to convey what’s in your head about a particular role, but we’re also fans of creating a memorable, overall “headline” for the work. After all, you’re unlikely to think to include absolutely everything this person will do in your bulleted list, and you don’t want your staff to think that if something is not listed, it’s not their responsibility, so make sure you’re clear on what the role is responsible for overall. For instance, the headline over your assistant’s work might be “CEO of Ensuring That All Logistics Run Smoothly.” (We like the “you are the CEO of . . .” construction as an easy way to communicate the essence of a role.)
The how: Since a written job description can never capture everything that will come up in the course of day-to-day work, you might also be explicit about how the staff member should approach her work, particularly if there are keys to success that are specific to the role. For instance, your role expectations for your assistant might include spotting and following up on new opportunities to increase efficiency or finding ways to make your days more effective. (To be clear, the how isn’t about dictating the specific activities the staff member will use to do her work; instead, it’s about the approach that you consider key to excelling in the role.)
Then, if your assistant knows the what and how of her job, you shouldn’t need to ask her to check on that wire transfer or to be sure to get coffee for the afternoon meeting, because a great CEO of logistics is someone you can count on to handle those details without your needing to point them out. Moreover, that vision of the job is one that great candidates will be excited to sign up for!
Here are a few more points to keep in mind as you’re creating meaningful roles for your staff:
If you’re overhauling the roles on your team or creating them anew, start by making a list of all the work that needs to be done, and then group it in logical buckets. Make sure that each category represents everything that needs to be covered, and try to avoid having any item in more than one bucket. Consultants call this idea MECE—mutually exclusive and completely exhaustive. That is, your division of labor should fully capture everything that needs to be done and not have overlap between areas.
Think not just about grouping (the buckets of work) but also about linking (how the roles interact with each). While roles should be MECE, you don’t want them to become closed-off silos where staff members never talk with each other. Consider what mechanisms will glue everything together to ensure people are cooperating and communicating to the extent needed (such as working groups, staff meetings, and e-mail groups).
Establish clear, unambiguous lines of reporting. Dual reporting structures tend to cause confusion; instead, define a primary reporting line for each person. For management geeks: this means that if you’re thinking about a matrix structure or dotted line reporting, you should ensure there’s a solid line to one person who is fundamentally responsible for any given staff member’s performance. For everyone: unambiguous lines of reporting means that you should not hide the fact that people in fact have managers. We recently encountered a client where the senior team was reluctant to tell the staff members that they had managers, even though there were clearly people responsible for hiring, supervising, evaluating, and firing them. Rather than feeling freed and empowered, the staff was confused and frustrated.
Once you’ve captured what you expect from the role on paper, you can use this document in many places: incorporating pieces of it in job announcements, using it when orienting a new employee, pulling from it when conducting performance evaluations, and using it to capture expectations as they evolve.1
EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT ROLE EXPECTATIONS
The “What”
Overall: You’re the CEO of making sure everything runs smoothly!
Administration/operations: Office space is functional and everyone has what they need to do their jobs well
Own all general/maintenance. Everything should be working well.
Ensure we have appropriate space, layout, furniture, and supplies to do best work.
Ensure all systems are working effectively (phones, Internet, mail, and so on).
Support additional administrative needs of office (faxing, mailing, and PDFs, for example).
Calendar and internal meetings: Manage calendars and implement internal meeting structure
Manage staff calendars to priorities (for example, surfacing questions, getting aligned on trade-offs, ensuring enough space and travel time).
Implement internal meeting schedule (check-ins, monthly and quarterly step-backs, team step-backs).
Tech and systems: Technology is appropriate to meet the needs of a growing team and we have the systems in place and working to gather, share, and track information
Ensure that all staff have the hardware and software they need for their work.
Manage the e-mail vendor, and ensure we have capacity to handle e-mail demands.
Ensure we have an appropriate data backup system and that it’s working effectively.
Spot opportunities to better track and maintain information.
Events and special projects: Own and help on other events and projects as needed
The “How”: Keys to Success!
100 percent follow-through: No dropped balls! Stay on top of all specific tasks and follow-up items and general areas of work; consistently meet deadlines.
Customer service orientation: We’re pretty busy here, and your job is to make it easy for staff to do their jobs. View your work as supporting the whole and integral to the team’s effectiveness.
Attention to detail: Everything going out (other than internal communication) is polished: accurate (for example, right content, no misspellings or grammatical errors) and precise (for example, reflects nuances, captures subtleties) and fits the situation (should have our “look and feel” generally but can be casual when the situation calls for it).
Positive attitude and flexibility: Approach work with a spirit of yes; strike a positive tone; push work forward through obstacles and adapt quickly as things change, which they inevitably will.
GOOD ROLES SHIFT THE WEIGHT!
Some managers hesitate to truly shift the weight of a responsibility to a staff member because they rightly feel that they need to stay involved. But remember that MOCHA (from the previous chapter) allows you to stay involv
ed as the M (manager), A (approver), or even H (helper), not the O (owner). By moving the ownership to your staff member, you move the weight but without bowing out entirely. Although your staff member is carrying the responsibility for the work, you’ll stay engaged, monitoring progress, acting as a resource, and stepping in to correct the course if needed.
GOALS: ROLES PLAYED OUT OVER A DEFINED PERIOD OF TIME
Roles let you shift the burden of driving forward responsibilities that would otherwise fall to you. Goals are the next step in that process, making it clear what the staff member should accomplish in the role over a specific period of time. Put another way, while roles define the what and how of a staff member’s responsibilities, goals define “how much.”
After all, an executive director whose head of fundraising does not have a fundraising goal has essentially said, “Can you help me with fundraising? ” But an executive director whose fundraising head has a goal of ensuring the organization raises $7.2 million this year has said, “You’re responsible for making sure we raise our budget.”
Goals, then, establish what success in a role looks like for a particular time period. For example, a development director might have goals like these:
Increase fundraising revenue from $1.2 million last year to $1.6 million this year.
Because they’re key to our future growth, increase the number of individuals giving $5,000 or more from twelve to twenty-four.
Goals like these bring powerful benefits:
Alignment. As you’re transferring the weight of a responsibility, goals send clear signals about what is most important. For instance, in the example above, it should be clear to the development director that spending lots of time maximizing small-dollar donors is not a priority, since it is not one of the main goals.
Healthy urgency and tension. Beyond being a tool for shifting weight, goals at their heart are an engine of progress. By setting goals that represent serious growth or impact, you make clear that you’re not just going about the normal course of business, which is a recipe for mediocrity; you’re striving to achieve more, and you instill a tension between the current state of affairs and where you’re trying to get. (Management guru Peter Senge describes this as akin to the tension in a rubber band when it’s extended.) Among the benefits this produces is a sense of urgency that permeates the organization and prevents distractions from creeping in. When a client comes to us complaining of internal “drama,” one of the first questions we ask is, “What are these people’s goals?” because we’ve found that when staff members are focused on reaching an ambitious goal, they rarely have time for drama.
Fresh thinking. A related benefit of the urgency instilled by goals is the constant need to get better at what you’re doing, which can lead to new thinking about tactics. For instance, in the example above, the ambitious goal of doubling the number of high-net-worth donors will require more than just incremental improvements; it will take serious thought to how to bring in more such donors.
Basis for accountability and reflection. Setting clear targets against which success will be judged lays the groundwork to reflect on what went well and what could have been improved. It also establishes the basis for accountability, so that managers and staff alike know when someone has lived up to expectations and when they have fallen short.
Meaning and motivation. The sense of accomplishment that comes from driving toward real progress makes most people’s jobs more satisfying, which will help you attract and retain great people (as we’ll discuss in Chapter Eight). For instance, the development director in the example might know that this year’s growth is part of a three-year effort to reach a revenue base of $3 million, which would enable the organization to expand to other regions. What could otherwise seem a never-ending series of thankless tasks (“send a proposal to XYZ Foundation”) becomes a path toward a broader purpose of expanding the organization’s impact.
In the rest of this chapter, we’ll discuss how to capture these benefits, first by describing the characteristics of an effective goal and then by discussing how you can set and use goals in practice.
SETTING SMART GOALS
While goals can confer powerful benefits, not all goals are created equal. Strong goals share a number of qualities, captured by the acronym SMART: strategic, measurable, ambitious, realistic, and time-bound.
Before we take a closer look at this, we want to warn you: some of what follows may look a little daunting at first. But know that every time you and your team go through the process of setting goals, things will get a little easier and a little more natural. So don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The important thing is to put clear goals in place and begin capturing their benefits, and then you can keep improving them over time.
Strategic
Goals are strategic when they reflect the most important dimensions of what the person responsible for them seeks to accomplish. Although this sounds obvious, we frequently see staff members set lofty sounding goals that don’t actually reflect their most important work. For instance, we recently met with a client who manages the head of finance for her organization and was reviewing the finance head’s goals. We asked the client to turn the draft goals over so she couldn’t look at them and then asked her to tell us what she most wanted the finance head to accomplish in the coming year. Without hesitation, she told us that the most important thing was for the finance head to provide quick and accurate revenue and expense information to help shape the organization’s decision making as it shifted resources from one area to another. We then turned the paper over and saw that the finance head’s goals related to things like increasing the speed with which the finance department paid its bills. This was a classic case of reasonable-sounding goals that were not strategic.
In addition to reflecting the most important work of a team or individual, goals that are strategic are aligned at every level of the organization. Individual staff members have goals that add up to the department’s goals, and department heads have goals that add up to the most important organizational priorities. Goals whose underlying objective is not connected in one way or another to the broad direction of the organization are not strategic and should be discarded.
Measurable
Consider the difference between an aspiring athlete who says, “I want to get in shape,” versus one who says, “By the end of the year, I will be able to run six miles in under an hour.” The former is a wish, the latter a commitment. Effective goals produce that sort of commitment by creating a clear finish line—a way to judge whether the goal has been attained.
What if your goals are hard to measure?
The easiest way for a goal to be measurable is for it to be quantitative, as in the runner example, but that doesn’t always need to be the case. Coming to a qualitative agreement about what success looks like can be an extraordinarily powerful tool for managers when success is hard to quantify, as it often is in the nonprofit context.
A COMMON PITFALL: CONFUSING DATA WITH GOALS
Your team members might track a wide variety of data. Remember, though, that collecting data on something does not in and of itself make it a goal you should be managing to. For instance, it might be smart for your head of communications to look at your monthly Web site traffic to inform your strategies. That doesn’t mean, though, that she should be expending effort to increase that traffic unless that is an explicit and deliberate aim that makes sense.
The trick in creating qualitative goals is to tap into the instinct that you would know success when you see it and to articulate the specifics beneath that instinct. For instance, an advocacy director’s goal might be to generate significant attention to the organization’s issue during a congressional campaign. The director might word the goal this way: “Our issue will become a salient issue in the congressional campaign, meaning that it will be included prominently in candidate materials, questions will be asked about it in debates and town hall meetings, candidates will mention it in ads and at ev
ents, and polls will show it among the top ten issues on voters’ minds.” Or your conference organizer might make one of her goals to “flawlessly execute our regional conference to present a highly professional image of Citizens for a Better World, provide high-quality training sessions that keep attendees engaged, ensure that all sessions and logistics run smoothly, and receive at least 90 percent positive feedback on evaluation forms from both presenters and participants.” This is largely qualitative, but it still establishes a bar for expectations.
Activities Versus Outcomes
Measurability also raises questions about what exactly should be measured: activities or outcomes?2 For instance, the advocacy director of a health care organization might set goals around activities and outcomes, such as the number of meetings held with legislators (activity) and the number of legislators who agree to support a bill (outcome). Activities tend to be easier to measure, and there is a direct correlation between the staff member’s efforts and the metric. With outcomes, it can be harder to attribute the result to the staff member’s effort. In this example, target legislators might decide to support the bill, but for reasons having little to do with the group’s efforts.
Nonetheless, effective managers do push to set goals around outcomes whenever feasible. By doing this, they are articulating an answer to not just, “What do I want you to do?” but more fundamentally, “What do I want you to achieve?” When everyone within an organization is clear on the answer to this second question, they are free to think of new ways to approach problems. Continuing with the congressional example, if the staff member is clear that the real goal is to get eight legislators to support the bill, she might think of better ways to make that happen than holding direct meetings (perhaps persuading large campaign contributors to place calls instead, for instance). In this way, outcome-oriented goals can be an antidote to micromanagement because they let the manager and the staff member focus on what the result should be, with the staff member’s job then being to figure out the best way to get there.
