How Clarifying Role Purpose Lifts Productivity by 20 Percent

In our previous blog posts, we explored the significance of having a personal purpose and how to find it. Now, we're moving to the next level of the purpose pyramid, which is understanding the importance of having clarity in the purpose of the role you play in your workplace and the role each of your employees plays in the team. Research has shown that our personal purpose and the roles we play at work are intertwined, and this intrinsic link creates our identity. Therefore, being clear on our role purpose can help us perform better at work, be more engaged, and reduce stress.

Why Clarity Is Worth Taking Seriously

An organisational alignment study by ISA Global found that strategic clarity accounts for a 31% difference between high and low performance across revenue growth, profitability, customer loyalty, leadership effectiveness, and employee engagement. If you are running a P&L and wondering why the numbers are harder to hit than the effort warrants, that gap is worth understanding.

McKinsey research points to three areas where high-performing organisations focus their clarity efforts:

• Who we are. Purpose, values and culture.
• How we operate. Structure, decision making and talent.
• Where we grow. Ecosystem, technology platforms and learning.

Over 80% of those areas come back to the clarity a leader provides. The problem is that clarity requires constant updating to stay useful as conditions change. It is not a one-off task, and most leaders underestimate the effort it takes to create and maintain it.

The Challenge of Role Clarity

One of the biggest challenges to providing clarity around role purpose is that many managers are uncertain about their own role purpose, let alone the purpose of their team's roles. This creates a lack of alignment and increases ambiguity and uncertainty for employees. Another challenge is that the purpose of some roles may have shifted over time, which can create confusion and anxiety.

Research has also shown that ambiguity and uncertainty about role purpose can lead to decreased productivity and increased stress levels. This is where leaders come in.

Start With Your Own Role Purpose

It's important that you have a clear understanding of your own role purpose first. Work with your manager to get really clear on their idea of your role purpose and the expectations of both them and the organisation on you. Often leaders are actually expending significant energy undertaking activities that are far from their purpose and actually belong in the remit of their team members.

The old adage holds: you cannot explain something well until you understand it yourself. A leader operating in ambiguity cannot give their team the clarity needed to make good decisions at the right level. Get clear on your purpose, your values, and why you are in the role. Establish your boundaries and what you will and will not do.

It's also crucial that once you are clear on your own role purpose, you communicate that effectively to your team. This often involves stepping back from the immediate delivery of tasks, and taking on the role of a conductor, ensuring that everything is in balance and everyone is in tune.

Communicate With More Precision

When people feel unclear, they waffle, use jargon, and bluff. Your team feels it, even when they do not say so. One change you can make immediately is to prepare your communications by thinking about how you want the message received, not just how you want to send it.

Before any significant communication, map out what you want the audience to think, feel, do, and know as a result. A simple four-by-two grid is all you need. You will find a planner template in the free resources library if you want to use it.

Using the ROLES Framework

Then take some time to reflect on the purpose of each role in your team. One effective way to achieve this is through the use of the ROLES framework, which helps to align the purpose of each role with the overall purpose of the team. Often when teams are created and new roles are created, they are done in isolation and nobody takes the opportunity to step back and think about the bigger picture of the contribution of all the roles to the team.

You have this amazing opportunity to take a helicopter view and determine whether the responsibilities, objectives, leadership, responsibilities, education, and support that each role requires actually line up. If you identify gaps or other discrepancies in the holistic picture, you have a great opportunity to deal with them there and then.

• R = Responsibilities
• O = Objectives
• L = Leadership
• E = Experiences / Education
• S = Support

Get Clear on What Your Team Is Actually Doing

Alongside the ROLES framework, it is worth working out what activity is producing results and what is not. Too many teams are still running legacy processes, reports, and methods that are irrelevant or counterproductive. Invite the team to surface those and address them. Ben Hunt-Davis and Harriet Beveridge wrote a book called "Will it make the boat go faster?" which is full of ideas that cut through the noise and sharpen focus. The central question is a useful one to put to any team reviewing its workload.

Having the Conversations With Your Team

Next, it's time to start talking to your team. These conversations should be a two-way street, with the leader asking questions to gain insight into the employee's interpretation of their role, and the employee providing feedback to ensure that their understanding aligns with the overall team objectives. By comparing their responses with your own assessment from the ROLES framework, you can ensure that everyone is on the same page and reduce any uncertainty or anxiety your team members might have about their role.

Many employees only refer to the top of their job description for their role purpose, which is often poorly written or unclear.

To provide clarity, take the time to revise and refresh the job descriptions with your team. Use the job description as a conversation prompt to agree and clarify what the role is meant to be. This process can also reveal any changes in the purpose of the role over time, allowing you to realign expectations and purpose.

Some useful questions to bring into these conversations:

• What do you see as the core purpose of your role, in one or two sentences?
• Which of your current activities feel most aligned to that purpose?
• Where are you spending time that feels disconnected from it?
• What would make it easier for you to focus on the work that matters most?

The Result: A High-Performing Culture

By helping to clarify the purpose of roles within a team, leaders can reduce uncertainty and anxiety for employees, resulting in increased engagement, lower levels of stress, and higher levels of performance. This in turn creates a positive and high-performing culture within the team, driving the team's success and overall business results.

Want to see how this works with your managers? Here is how I work with GMs.

If this sounds like your week

Your managers are not the problem. They are where the problem is stuck.

When your last leadership spend was signed off, did anyone go back to those managers' bosses and ask what changed? That question is the JBL Outcome Standard, and it is how I work.

• Find the friction. A short diagnostic that shows which decisions are stalling, and at what level.
• Am I the bottleneck? Ten questions on where your week is actually going.
• How I work with GMs. Six weeks, one hour a week, up to twelve of your managers, scored by their own bosses.
• Beat Burnout, Boost Performance. The book.
• The High Performance Leader podcast.

Managers I work with reclaim around four hours a week, and their bosses score the change 8.75 out of 10. Would it be a crazy idea to find out how we did this? Book a scoping call.

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