A role is the aggregation of actions that is expected from you. It establishes your position in a team and defines your behavior.
Roles are:
- Formal
- Executive (execution) roles – what to do
- Management (administrator) roles – who is the one that tells others what to do
- Informal – they emerge as a need related to the functioning of the team but are not specified in a job description
You should pay attention to some specific aspects of a role:
- Ambiguity – when an employee is not clear about the expectation that the other employees have from him because he was not provided with clear performance expectations and performance feedback
- Conflict – when an employee is not clear about his responsibilities and how to prioritize them. It is mostly a problem of not getting the right employee for the right job.
The incompatibility between the expectations of a role and what happens in reality is not always the employee’s fault. As manager you should remember that if an employee does not understand is almost every time your fault because you did not sent the right message.
