Are You Overdue for a Role Clarity Check-Up?

Role clarity often comes up at the hiring end of the employee lifecycle and for good reason.  Research has found a clear and consistent connection between new hires being clear on the job they’re saying “yes” to and their intentions to stay beyond the first one or two years.  Clarity can be achieved using a method called the Realistic Job Preview.

The Realistic Job Preview

A Realistic Job Preview (RJP) is a candid conversation about the role, including challenges and stressors, that helps the applicant to make an informed decision and to enter their new job with balanced expectations.  The RJP is a helpful offset to recruiting attempts, which naturally focus on the benefits and advantages of accepting an employment offer.

RJPs provide role clarity by covering:

• Why the role exists
• Responsibilities, priorities, pace and workload
• Challenges and job demands
• Opportunities and job resources
• Success on the job and how it will be defined
• Organizational dynamics such as areas where being independent or interdependent is expected

And all of this is highly effective — for a while.

RJPs have a Limited Shelf Life

The challenge is, most roles are highly dynamic for a variety of reasons, including:

• Leadership changes and shifts in strategy/vision
• Technological changes that automate old responsibilities
• Job enlargement or enrichment, which can expand complexity and scope
• Informal duties
• Involvement in major projects/transformations

These shifts can create role ambiguity and frustration when responsibilities and success are not clearly defined.  Exit surveys increasingly reference a lack of clear expectations as a driver of intentions to leave. 

Perhaps It’s Time for a Role Clarity Check-Up

There is an alternative, of course —a recalibration or a role clarity check-up.  Consider two things:

1. Roles are dynamic everywhere, which means that drifting into ambiguity is likely inevitable regardless of the job or agency
2. Role clarity check-ups help everyone — including leaders — by surfacing questions that can bring about clarity and alignment for all involved

A role clarity check-up is as simple as revisiting the RJP areas above with a leader while challenging everyone involved to consider these areas in terms of what is real today.  Such a topic can serve as a standing agenda item for quarterly or annual conversations.  It can also be a discussion that occurs at key points of lacking clarity, at the start of major initiatives, or when one is getting ready to assume additional or different responsibilities.

And Be Mindful of One More (Important) Thing

A critical distinction can be between role clarification and role clarity.  Clarification is any attempt a leader makes to speak to the RJP areas above.  Clarity only happens when the clarification connects and employees understand their role and what is being expected of them.  In other words, clarification is the effort whereas clarity is the desired result. 

An RJP helps people say “yes” to starting a role.  A role clarity check-up can empower employees to keep saying “yes” as roles evolve and change.  Clarity is an ongoing practice, not an absolute.  The more intentional we are about sustaining it, the better equipped we will be to serve where we can make a difference here and now.

Ernest currently serves as a Personnel Research Psychologist within the Chief Human Capital Office of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). He earned his Ph.D. in industrial-organizational psychology from the University of Akron in 2016. Over the last 20 years, he has worked in for-profit, non-profit, and government settings while holding a variety of individual contributor and leadership roles. His areas of expertise and experience include assessment for hire and development, leadership development, employee engagement, performance management, and organizational change and transformation. 

Photo Credit: Skyler Ewing at pexels.com.