Role Structure

David Cuykendall
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An efficient role structure provides a common understanding of what must done and how it will done to unify employee actions in attaining their keys to success, results, and assigned purposes.

Further, there should be two well-defined roles; the line role and the support role.

Responsibilities and authorities are established through a process of delegation to line roles, and through the assignment of tasks and identification of the purposes of these tasks to support roles. A single point of accountability applies and the line role has primacy.

The process owner is accountable to the asset owner who is responsible for the performance of the organization’s assets. The function owner who is responsible for the means by which processes are enacted is accountable to the process owner.

Process owners and function owners owe their supporting roles to the asset owner, who bears overall responsibility for the organization’s financial performance.

Tasks are never assigned without a clear-cut identification of the purpose of a task and “purpose” is understood to be inviolate. This focuses employees on a common goal while permitting them the latitude to adjust their tasks to ensure they meet their assigned purposes.

If this is done efficiently, employees are never left guessing at their responsibilities or the means they are to use to fulfill their tasks. Their assigned purposes not only identify their role within their parent unit and their responsibilities vertically, but also their responsibilities to the units with whom they horizontally collaborate — units that have been assigned different tasks and different purposes, but are nevertheless guided by a well-defined and unambiguous globally shared intent, providing unity of effort throughout the organization.

This leads to another core principle of role structure and that is that no two units are ever assigned the same tasks or the same purposes, or the same level of authority and accountability.

By inefficiently giving the same task and same purpose to each unit, each unit is instructed to carry out separate missions in separate silos, while the same results are demanded from all. Under these conditions, no coordination to unite their efforts results, nor is a clear comprehensive direction established. Further, the principles of a single point of accountability and functional congruence (i.e., the prohibition of the conflation of functional roles) are violated.

Unity of effort is the key.

All elements in the organization work to ensure that the main and supporting efforts are successful.