When your house is a mess, the most common advice from professionals who help create order out of clutter is to sort like with like. Putting miscellaneous items in one box doesn’t help you get organized.
To put your proverbial house in order in your marketing or communication team, it’s best to start by determining your overall responsibility set—which will depend on business goals and what your clients need and expect from you.
Once you map out the job functions you need (email marketing, copywriting, web production, content strategy, etc.), you can figure out for each of these functions who should be involved, and which functions are not adequately staffed.
The cost of fuzzy job roles
When you have a small team, contributors with a wide variety of skills sets are very valuable. Without a dedicated copywriter, the copywriting task may be shared among two or three people. Or maybe your web producer also shoots some video on the side.
When individual contributors take on a variety of responsibilities, they aren’t boxed into narrow roles, and your team can be flexible, and cover for each other when one or more team members are absent.
But such fluidity and flexibility comes at a price. Here are seven reasons why a lack of clarity can hamper the performance of your team.
1. Difficulty allocating resources effectively
When a new project or client comes along, you waste time figuring out who is available to take on the new workload. Even worse, you may be allocating the project to the wrong person because without clarity availability often trumps skill set and so you risk that team members take on tasks outside of their area of expertise. Clear functional roles ensure that the right person does the right job at the right time.
2. Too many cooks in the kitchen
If you share similar responsibilities with a multitude of members in your team, you will spend too much time and energy on communication and on managing minor project details. Kick all the sidekicks out of the kitchen to make sure that people spend their precious time on getting the job done.
3. It’s always someone else’s job
Every important task requires an owner or team members will not feel a sense of ownership for tasks that haven’t explicitly been assigned to them. As you only do the important things (right?), this means that in a fuzzy organization many important tasks fall between the cracks. Get rid of the fuzziness and people will take pride in being responsible and in charge.
4. Today’s tactics conceal tomorrow’s strategy
Without a strong sense of ownership, individual contributors often prioritize urgent and tactical tasks and rarely take the time to plan and execute against a long-term vision. Ownership avoids ad-hoc work habits.
5. Team members are spread too thin
With fourteen responsibilities or projects on your plate, you will be a lot less productive than when you have four. Focus on a few areas of strength to increase your impact.
6. Performance data are inconclusive
The first tenet of analytics is to measure one thing at a time. If your team members are engaged in too many projects, it becomes very difficult to measure the effectiveness of their work and assess how much they contribute to the team. Measure—and reward—their performance against core responsibilities.
7. Overgrown career paths
When your garden is overgrown with blackberries and nettles, it’s hard to see where to plant your seeds. Motivate and retain people by clearing away everything that’s secondary and show them how they can grow within your team or company.
Great content is produced by skilled people who are clear about their core roles and responsibilities.
When your marketing and content team is large enough, mapping out how individuals can most effectively contribute can be valuable, even if it leads to less flexibility.
Added bonus: No one on your team will ever be wondering what it is, exactly, that their co-workers are doing.
