Today we will focus on a very important concept in both virtual and everyday reality: Understanding one’s role and its interconnection with other roles in the team. All what we do passes through a deep connection with others, no matter what is the set of options you have on the table: working is a cooperative thing.
Understanding roles and qualifying them correctly becomes an enabler for excellence. This is very important in physical world, but becomes essential when working with remote teams: resources may not have immediately an idea of how their work fits into a larger context and this risks to create issues and misunderstandings, not to mention inefficiency.
Differently from physical presence, virtuality avoids the clarification of roles on an ongoing basis so yo as a manager, need to enable the process.
Not having clear roles and how our positioning relates to other team members, can easily lead to duplication of activities or impact when things are not done at the right time or in the correct context while causing a domino effect which then penalises the performance of the group.
And here steps in the communication which we should always keep in mind: facilitating conversation with your team about roles should be a recurring part of meetings both in the clear case of when organisational changes occur and in the less clear moment when teams autonomously adapt roles and processes to fit new situations.
More generally, you need to analyse yourself and your organisation considering all aspects you can envision on organisational strategy:
- List go first! What are our roles? Name them one by one and put them on a “map” to clearly show how they can be represented
- Work with a target in mind. In our work, what should we do? identify the scope of your activities and match them with roles
- Are roles defined functional or dysfunctional? How do our roles support performance goals and by doing so enable processes and achieving targets? Do they enable leveraging people’s strengths
- Overlapping? Not thanks. Where do roles overlap? By acting on the point above you will see that the team will highlight overlapping responsibilities sometime not clearly declared during normal work but that, if not addressed, can become a real issue
- What are the connections among roles? As said nothing is isolated, so what are the connections between roles? Are all of them clear or do they have components that happen “under the hood”?
