Everyone knows clear roles and responsibilities are important, right? That’s why we write job descriptions. That’s why managers work so hard to set expectations. That’s why smart employees make an effort to clarify those expectations. Clear roles and responsibilities matter!

Unfortunately, we aren’t doing enough. These techniques simply aren’t adequate.

A job description can’t anticipate and document responsibilities for every situation that pops up day to day.

Managers, though closer to the work and able to be more adaptable and flexible than a job description, still aren’t there to clarify responsibilities for every situation.

Employees often fail to push back and clarify sufficiently. Sometimes they are just too busy to think. Other times they are intimidated by the situation or assume that more senior people should be doing the clarifying. No one wants to look like the only clueless person in the room.

To makes matters worse, collaborative projects throw people together from multiple departments and create overlaps and gaps in those well-defined responsibilities.

Furthermore, there are those times when the detail-oriented, ultra-capable woman who usually handles certain responsibilities impeccably is on vacation and the blue-sky guy known for dropping balls despite having the exact same job description steps in to take her place. You would be foolish to ignore this discrepancy and assume that the default roles and responsibilities have you covered.

I’m sure you can think of more reasons why top-down, pre-defined roles and responsibilities don’t ensure the daily clarity needed for both progress and quality.

What we need is clarity-in-the-moment. Everyone needs to master the basic questions that create clarity-in-the-moment, questions such as:

• What exactly are we trying to accomplish?
• Whose decision is this?
• Who needs to provide input for this decision, both so we make a smart decision and so we make an acceptable decision for those most critical to implementing the decision?
• What could go wrong?
• What’s the next step?

Blind action, plowing ahead, wandering in without this kind of clarity, is a recipe for waste, mistakes, and heartache.