Emojis & Sticky Notes: A collaborative way to align your leadership team
By Gregory Perrine - eGuide Founder/CEO
Who’s On First? The Struggle With Small Organization Leadership
Flexibility is the name of the game for small organizations. In any given day your Chief Operating Officer may need to be the front line, the accountant, human resources, compliance and try to carve out the time to actually work on moving the business forward as the CEO. Especially if you are a self-funded organization, job descriptions may not carry much weight, since everyone has to be willing to do what it takes to grow.
Sure, I’ve been there, setting the intention of creating a job description as something to aspire to, hitting up Google and looking for similar roles in the ether and picking and choosing some bullet points that align with my thoughts. No matter which way you spin it, those outlines, bullet points, and expectations don’t mean much of anything if they are not referenced and put into practices.
Having gone through this with eGuide, there will come a time (probably 2-4 employees in) where you realize that just because you can run around and do all the roles, doesn’t mean you should. You will start to hear a few passing comments from team members about who they should go to with questions, and you might find yourself saying, “Here is the answer, I’ll just follow up with X to make sure they know we talked later.”
THIS IS A SIGN TO NOT FALL INTO THAT TRAP.
The outcome of continuing down this path will be confusion and chaos for your team. Ultimately, this will slow your growth. As an owner/operator, I can empathize with the fact that taking one step back to go two steps forward is hard, but it has to be done. Just as you are reaching this lovely false summit, we have the perfect exercise to help align your leadership team (and yes, it involves emojis).
Emoji & Sticky Note Exercise
The Framework
Utilizing a virtual whiteboarding tool (we recommend LucidSpark), break the canvas into three parts:
Objectives, Responsibilities, and Roles.
Objectives
Under objectives, outline your intentions with a few powerful alignments stations. Summarize what you are hoping to accomplish with this exercise, and be as specific as possible. A statement might sound like, “Our objective is to alleviate the pressure put on the CEO by distributing marketing and finance responsibilities.” or, “To ensure that the entire leadership is comfortable with the assigned roles and we are able to explore critically why some responsibilities may be best suited for other members of the team.” To wrap this section up, create sticky notes with each member of your leadership team.
Responsibilities
As you design the responsibilities section focus more on the actions not the roles. Creating buckets like “Money management” is better than “CFO responsibilities”. This small distinction will allow your leadership team to explore openly about where they align with functions. Beneath each bucket begin to fill out job functions on sticky notes. Ensure that each section is assigned a different color (we will explain the why in just a moment)
Roles
To start, create a column assigned to each person on the leadership team. There is no need to populate any existing responsibilities, but use the time to think through what each person on the leadership team’s core responsibilities are and ensure they are on the list of responsibilities above. The roles section will be used as the exercise is executed.
The Exercise
Enter Emojis
To start the exercise, share the whiteboard with the leadership team. We find that a brief video overview exploring the whiteboard and reviewing the objectives is a great way to ensure everyone is understanding what to do accordingly. Conclude by asking each team member to assign an emoji of their choosing (different than anyone else) to their employee sticky note in the objectives section. Then, ask them to assign their emoji to any sticky note that is listed in the responsibilities section.
It’s important to note that two emojis on a card is welcome, and anything with multiple emojis will be discussed in the next meeting. Do not have any team members move sticky notes to the roles section during this first part.
Rumble & Reorganize
We are fans of Brene Brown’s Rumble rules, and this is a great opportunity to frame the conversation about how to organize roles and responsibilities. A little kind candor can go a long way for the alignment meeting. It may also be beneficial to have a meeting mediator (*cough cough eGuide) to help ensure that anything that may have tension is navigated with an objective third party.
During the meeting, each responsibility will be discussed and approved collectively by majority vote. As much as possible, each responsibility should have 1 primary leader. This doesn’t mean a responsibility cannot be supported by other teammates or leadership members, but when it comes to decision-making, the final say should be put on one agreed-upon person.
As responsibilities are being assigned, each sticky note can be copied and placed under the appropriate person. If you want to assign support roles, you can note them within the sticky or utilize other emojis assigned to the complete team.
Work responsibilites from left to right to create meaningful conversation and a clear representation of how responsibilities are spread across the organization.
Remember those colors we chose for each sticky note? What’s fun to watch is seeing each leadership team member’s color mix.
Job Descriptions That Align With What You Do
Following the completion of the exercise, it’s time to put those thoughts into actual job descriptions. Remember, these job descriptions are NOT being created to share with recruiters to go scour LinkedIn for the ideal candidate. These are job descriptions that should inform everyone at the organization about what each leadership teammember does, and who they should go to for questions.
We encourage creating sections that are aligned to each person’s core responsibilities and write in a language that is clear and makes sense to what you do and how you do it.
For example, recruiter language would be, “Complete month end audits that result in executive reports for financial projections”. Authentic language may be, “Complete the budget tracker at the end of each month and ensure that graphs and charts on tab 2 are accurate.”
The more specific you are, the easier it will be for each teammember to stay in their lane, and for everyone to remain accountable of what decisions were made during the exercise. The other half of the accountability equation is to also reference the job descriptions on a quarterly basis. A lot can change for a small organization in 3 months, so ensuring that the job descriptions are changing with your team is essential.
We recommend implementing a 90 day check-in with all staff, including leadership, and utilize the drafted job descriptions as the agenda. Discussing the progress and modification of each item, will further solidify responsibilities, and ensure that any changes that occurred are being captured.
Expanding the Exercise
After having completed the exercise for leadership, you can easily have your core leadership team facilitate the same exercise with individual teams. Getting granular and creating authentic job descriptions for each team member will only benefit workflow and operations within the organization.
Yes, in a nut shell we are talking about communication, but for employees it also extends into the realm of HR. Having a clear understanding of what success looks like for each person’s role will only reveal insights when it comes time for reviews and promotions.
Making it Work for Small Organizations
We know there is never enough hours in the day, and for many small organizations, taking your leadership team out of commission will slow down operations. This exercise takes that into consideration. The heaviest lift is done on independent time, leaving the 1-2 hours of meetings to discuss responsibilities the only “in-person” time required (Live is always great, but video works as well).
We’ve personally experienced the outcomes of the exercise and have a hard time imagining a world without “living job descriptions”. If you need an extra hand to help you through, we are always here to help!
Help Someone. Have Fun, Be You. Learn & Teach. Finish What You Start.
