3.4 Types of Roles

Fundamentals

Roles can generally follow different approaches — all of which are valid and can coexist within the same team:

• Skill-based roles (e.g. “Design”) vs. Admin/Management-based roles (e.g. “Customer Support”)

• Content-defining roles (e.g. “Social Media Strategy”) vs. Hierarchy-defining roles (e.g. “Head of Social Media”)

• Single-owner roles (e.g. “CEO”) vs. Multiple-owner roles (e.g. “Copywriter”)

• Internal roles (e.g. “Mail handling, team events…”) vs. Customer-facing roles (e.g. “Key Account Manager, Sales…”)

Classifications

When we define roles within a team, we often find that a large number of roles emerge. That means if you only keep onelist of roles, it quickly becomes overwhelming. It’s therefore advisable to introduce different categories or classes of roles to bring more structure into the system.

In the classic teamdecoder framework (which can be customized at any time for any team), we suggest the following categories:

• Skills – These are, in the spirit of the initial definition, skill-based roles, such as “Design” or “Programming.” Important: This is not about skills, talents, or strengths that are required to perform a role! That connection doesn’t exist in the teamdecoder logic. “Skills” are a dedicated category of roles.

• Roles – This includes all organizational, support, management, or admin type roles.

Skills and Roles are both role types that can be held by multiple people at the same time. The next two categories, however, are designed to allow only one clearly defined role owner — to ensure clarity and accountability.

• Domains – Often also referred to as “Ownership” or “Areas of Responsibility.” A domain might be a budget, a strategy, a piece of software, an Excel sheet, a customer persona, a client, a product, a store window, a coffee machine, or a geographic region.
  Being responsible for a domain does not mean being the only one who works on it. Others can work with it, but not everyone is accountable. The domain itself then defines what it means to be responsible — e.g. managing access, keeping lists up to date, etc.

• Links – Every modern team needs strong connections. That means a team must consider who they need a strong connection to, and who within the team will manage that link. This could be a connection to the CEO, another department, a regional office, a service provider, etc.

That’s how it looks in teamdecoder:

Links:

• Knowledge Base "Skills": https://teamdecoder.tawk.help/article/skills-tool

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

• Knowledge Base "Domains": https://teamdecoder.tawk.help/article/domains

• Knowledge Base "Links": https://teamdecoder.tawk.help/article/links