3.3 Elements of a Role Definition

If we now take a position (or an entire team) and want to break the work down into roles, what elements should this role description include?
Let me give you a definition here that has always helped me in practice and that forms the basis of the teamdecoder app – which doesn't mean that a role can't be described in other ways as well. Feel free to leave a comment on that in the feedback section!

Name: What do we call the role?
e.g., “Salaries” or “PPT Design”

Purpose: Why do we need the role?
e.g., “Make customers happy” or “Free up the boss’s time”

Tasks: What exactly is someone holding this role expected to do?
e.g., “Design Instagram posts and save them in Canva” or “Write proposals”

Goals: How could we regularly measure whether the role is being performed well?
e.g., “10% increase in revenue” or “Organize 3 team events per year”

Owner: Of course, we also need to define who holds this role.
This could be the name of a person or several people (e.g., a creative agency team might have 17 designers). It could also be left blank if the role currently doesn’t need to be or can’t be filled.

By the way: If those 17 designers are not all doing the same thing, I recommend setting up different roles! (e.g., Social Media Design, Corporate Design, PPT Design, etc.)

Workload: This doesn’t always need to be defined upfront, or sometimes not at all.
However, especially for budgeting discussions, it’s helpful to know how many FTEs (Full-Time Equivalents) are planned for a role.
For example, should the “Social Media Manager” role be filled by three people (which could also be 6 x 0.5 FTE), or is the plan to add more developers next year?

This is how it looks, for example, in teamdecoder:

Personal Development

A person’s familiarity with a role is not directly part of the role description, but it often plays a crucial role in the actual assignment of roles. It’s quite common in teams for someone to give up a role because they’re too busy with other roles. At teamdecoder, we call this “fading out.”

On the other hand, if someone is about to take on a new role but either doesn’t have the capacity yet or still needs some time to shadow and learn a few things, we refer to this as “fading in.”

Links:

• Blog: "Roles": https://teamdecoder.tawk.help/article/roles

• Blog: "Single/Multiple Owner Roles": https://teamdecoder.tawk.help/article/single-multiple-owners-roles

• Blog: "Fading Roles": https://teamdecoder.tawk.help/article/fading-in-out