Roles & Teams

Roles and teams are the structure your people fit into: a role says what good looks like for a job, and a team says who works together. Once your skills exist, this is the first thing to set up. With roles in place, every person you add lands with clear expectations from day one.

Roles

A role is a clear statement of what good looks like for a job, expressed as the skills that matter most. Assign skills you’ve created or imported to the role; everything else (coaching, progress, and development) hangs off them.

Start with a few skills

When first defining a role, resist the urge to list everything. Start with the handful of skills, typically 4–6, that most determine success in the role and tie to your business goals. A focused set is easier to coach against and clearer for the person growing into the role; broaden it over time until it covers everything the role expects.

Designations

Mark how central each skill is to the role:

• Required: core to the role; expected of everyone in it.
• Priority: important and worth focusing on next.

Teams

Teams group your people so you can manage and report on them together, mirroring how your organization is actually structured. A person can belong to more than one team, and teams can be nested into a hierarchy to reflect departments, regions, or reporting lines.

A person is assigned to a role (which gives them skills to develop) and to one or more teams (which group them for management and reporting). See Adding & managing people.