3 Steps to Define Roles and Responsibilities in a Small Business

Before I found the three tips that we're going to cover in this video, I used to find defining the job roles and responsibilities in my small business super challenging. I mean, I made so many mistakes. One of the most obvious ones was that whenever I would look to hire or delegate and I needed to come up with these roles and responsibilities, I would find myself just googling. I would search job boards or YouTube and I just look up what is a typical job description for this area of my business. Then I'd copy and paste different components of job descriptions to put them together into one kind of Frankenstein. I'd slap a title on it that I thought was the most common title possible and I'd post it out there. Now, besides the obvious issues of just copy and pasting random things on the Internet, the challenge with this non strategy was that when I actually got people into the role, they didn't have clear direction because the job description, the thing that described what they were signing up for, didn't truly describe what I needed them to do in my small business. The main reason for that is because I, I didn't do my homework. I didn't define the job role and responsibilities myself. I just kind of shopped around, copy and pasted generic HR language, threw it into a job description and thought my job was done. Now, despite all this clarity in hindsight in the moment, I really thought I was doing the right thing. But knowing what I know now, I realized I was really making my life so much harder. In fact, over the years I've developed this little three step framework for defining job roles and responsibilities. That's so easy. I kind of thought everyone already knew and just didn't tell me. But in case no one told you either, I figured I'd share it in this video so you can steal it when you're trying to define the job roles and responsibilities. Boy, that's a mouthful for your company. The first step that I want to do when I'm defining the job role and responsibility is to look at the company itself. So look at your team and what I like to do, and this is a one time exercise, is to figure out what all does my business need to do, Period. All of it. What are all the things that are happening? I like to get those out of my head and mapped out in an org chart. Up at the top of this chart you're going to want to define the overall goal of the business and you're going to break it down further as you go further down the chart. This is actually an exercise that we cover in more detail in the training. That's in the description. It's totally free. But if you want to learn more about this, check that out in the description below. This is an exercise that I actually started doing for myself and I found it so helpful I started sharing it with clients and I'm sharing with all of you here. And I call this exercise the process of org chart. Because essentially by writing down all that your business does, what you're essentially doing is recording all of the processes in your business. Now, I know, I know, I know. Some people will see someone with four eyes talking about the word process and they'll immediately start falling asleep. I don't want you to do that because, yes, we're using the word process here, but don't let that scare you. All it means is stuff that happens. I mean, it's not the pure definition, but essentially that's the core thing. So stop. Stuff that happens. Process. Process org chart shows you all the stuff that happens. This is a chart you're going to spend some time creating the first time around, but once you have it set up, you can easily reference it for all other roles in almost no time at all. For me, this process org chart in and of itself is really helpful in the job roles and responsibilities because it lets me start seeing what all needs to happen. What are the areas of responsibility that even exist? Because yes, every one of these processes is an area of responsibility in your business. Some areas might be very broad, like get clients, and other areas might be very specific, like edit your YouTube video. But each of these different pieces is an area of responsibility that could potentially end up as a job role and responsibility. See where this is going? Good. I hope so, because now in step two, what we're going to do is grab a marker and start circling things. Now with our highlighter, what we want to do. Gosh, these are serious. Now we want to make sure we start circling the different job, role and responsibilities that go together. Now, I know this go together piece can be a little challenging. All I'm looking for is areas where if I were to hire a person or if I have someone on my team, I'd want these things owned by the same human being. So, for example, I probably want the same person designing my thumbnails as I have designing my social media posts. Maybe I want those to go together because to me, I want one designer doing everything. I'm going to circle those in one color, then I'm going to grab another color and I'm going to start circling other Roles that go together. My goal here is to cluster every role and responsibility in my business into groups that make sense in my brain that I'd want to have done by the same human in my small business. Now, this process of highlighting is going to look very different. If you're in a larger organization, in a large organization, they won't need these colors. Every single process will be owned by one person. You'll have one person who just records YouTube videos and you'll have one person who just creates thumbnails. And every single thing is owned by a specialist. So this process of coloring just isn't so helpful. But in a small business, we don't have that luxury and nor would we really want to be just a cog in a machine. So we tend to own more areas of responsibility. So in circling things, we want to circle. Assuming we are hiring for a small business where people will do more than just one thing. And that's what these markers will help you kind of of grouped together once you're done. And this is a super simplified version. You'll see a chart that looks something like this where you have all of the processes in your business logged. You have circles around them saying this is one grouping. And there you go, you have your roles and responsibilities defined. Each color is a role. All you need to do is name it. Each responsibility is a box and it's inside the relative role. So just to repeat that one more time, make sure you're with me. So one color is a role. The stuff is in the color is your role responsibilities. One of the beautiful things about this kind of layout is because we started by inventorying what your business needs to do and then circled out roles and responsibilities from there is we can guarantee that you're not missing anything. Right. How many times have we hired and we give them a list of tasks, then we realize, oh, actually I need you to do this other thing too, or this other thing too, or we're still. How many times have business owners hired team members? But then there's tasks that come up that don't fit into anybody's job. So the business owner just needs to figure it out. Both of those situations are what happens when we let things slip through the cracks, when we start just thinking of things rather than going from what we actually need and working backwards. So this process of circling things, this is step two. And actually I have a bonus tip that's really helpful related to this one. So if you want to see that stay till the end like and subscribe and all that stuff too. Let's move on to the third one though. The third step is that in addition to this chart here, I maintain two other charts in my business. Okay, two other charts. They're much easier though, so don't freak out. The two other charts I use to accompany this one is first the job role org chart and the job title org chart. These are two little bonus nerdy things, but they really help me think about team composition and they might help you as well. The job role chart is taking all of the colors from our process org chart and turning it into its own own chart. That was a lot of uses of the word chart, but basically it looks like this. So rather than just having all of my color coding on there and hoping I can figure out what's what when there's so many things going on in the process org chart, I create this chart that shows me all of the job roles, AKA the collections of responsibilities in my business and who they report to. As someone who runs a small team, I love this chart is just one I use more than anything else because even though we might have only a team of eight, we have something like 12 different roles in the business. One of the things I love most about this chart, and you can see it because this is actually our org chart here at ProcessDriven is I am at the bottom and the top of this org chart, which is I think more representative of how most small businesses work. I report to the project manager, I'm also the manager of the project manager. And this kind of non hierarchical hierarchy is something that you can really only see in these kinds of charts. So this is the job role chart that we maintain. The second chart is just a traditional human org chart. In other words, what is the person, what is their job title? Who do they report to? I also think about this as an HR chart because even though in a small business everyone kind of reports to everyone when it comes to HR and performance reviews and one on ones, we need to have a little bit more structure. So this is all the job roles in ProcessDriven as of right now. And one funny thing about this is there's a lot of boxes on this chart. Looking at this without knowing anything else, you'd think there's 15, 20 people working at ProcessDriven, my small business here. But the fact is there's not. There's just a handful of us. So why do we have so many boxes? That's because job roles were those circles we did back on the processor chart. Right? Well, one person in a small business very easily could be doing two, three or four different job roles altogether. They might own all of those responsibilities in one. That's why these job role charts like this are so useful for small businesses. Because if we only kept track of job titles, meaning what we called somebody, that's not going to tell us anything. It's the job roles that really define what people do. And that could be one job role or 10 job roles. For more on job roles versus job titles, to just break that down a bit more, watch this video up here where I go into a little bit more detail. Anyway, because the job role chart is so useful, this is my second go to tool behind the process or chart when it comes to hiring. This is where I'll start mapping out things and figuring out where people will be working together. Who should be the onboarding buddy. Everything comes back to this chart. But because we still need to maintain HR things and do performance evals and all this other stuff, we also do maintain the second chart I mentioned at the beginning, which is a human org chart. As you can see, for a small team, it is not really that exciting. It's much simpler than the role chart. On this chart, everybody only shows up one time, even if they're in multiple roles or departments and it shows their primary position in the organization. This chart, as I kind of hinted at before, is not the most accurate for small teams and might not even be useful at all for solopreneurs. Because for example, me here up at the top, I'm certainly not always up at the top. For example, right here, I'm actually working under Mariah right now to record this video and I'm going to be working with the video editor to make this happen. For example, my job title I guess is owner. Business owner, I don't know, something like that. But I am also the content creator. I'm also the thumbnail designer. I'm also the email writer. I'm also the, you know, it just keeps going on and on and on. So unless you want a really, really long job title like, like a startup founder who wants to get credit for every little element that they installed, job titles really aren't that, that valuable. Now, I'm no expert in hiring. I have made so many mistakes in hiring, it's almost not funny. But then you gotta think about it and it is kind of funny. Uh, but I am someone that really believes in the power of process. I believe that if more operators, more small business owners, more operations geeks start sharing how they do things, then everybody else will benefit in this ecosystem. So I want to lead by example and just share what I've found to be helpful. And I hope you'll share what works for you in the comments below. Oh, and I owe you a bonus tip that I mentioned earlier in the video. If you stay till the end, hopefully you remember that. If not, well, that's kind of weird because you just watched it. Come on, people. But my bonus tip for you is around what growth might look like. One easy way to figure out what role you should hire next, or how to grow or scale up your team is to actually go back to your job roles and compare them to your job titles. You know how I mentioned that larger businesses, they'll typically have one job role or even one process per job title? Yeah. Well, when it comes to growing your small team, sometimes the best way to do that and to find that next role you need to hire for is by splitting roles. So look at the job title that currently owns four job roles and see can you split them so that the person retains two job roles and the other two job roles become their own job title? Wow, this is a mouthful. And that is what you hire for next. My favorite way to do this is by actually working with the team that you currently have and asking them, hey, of all the things you do now, which are your least favorite? Which are you not thriving in? Which just feel like they're hard for you? Those questions can usually help you identify the job roles that are best removed from that person's plate to let them focus in and specialize slightly more on the remaining job roles inside their job title. Wow, there's a lot of uses of the word job in this video, but that's my bonus tip for you, so I hope that's helpful. If you'd like to keep learning about hiring, job roles, delegation and all this stuff, you should probably watch this video on the end screen next where I actually stalked the famous operator and integrator, Leila Hermosi. I watched every single one of her videos and I captured her go to 100 million dollar hiring process. And I'm just sharing it with all of you because I thought it was really interesting. Click that button here on the end screen and until next time, enjoy the process.