I’ve just completed two organisational design projects with founders looking at creating the first leadership teams for their businesses.

That means I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about role clarity.

Which got me to noticing the complete absence of it in so many scaling businesses when I first come across them.

Let me give you an example. Last week I had a half hour intro call with a founder who told me her team was “totally empowered to make decisions.”

Then in the same call she spent at least five minutes telling me how nothing was getting decided without her involvement.

The contradiction didn’t seem to register until I asked her to reflect on the relationship between those things she told me.

This got me thinking about poor role definition and the problems it creates.

Those problems typically seem completely unrelated until you realise they all stem from the same root cause.

Let’s explore that a bit more.

When roles aren’t properly defined, delivery slows to a super slow pace.

People duplicate work because nobody’s quite sure who owns what.

Or things fall through the cracks entirely because everyone assumed someone else was handling it.

I’ve watched teams spend hours in meetings trying to untangle who should be doing what, when a simple DACI matrix would have solved it in fifteen minutes.

As I seem to say a lot – it’s all gaps and overlaps. But it gets worse…

Founders end up with this bizarre situation where people are technically empowered but functionally paralysed.

You’ve told them they can make decisions. You think you’ve given them autonomy but they’re not taking it.

But because their role boundaries aren’t clear, they don’t know which decisions are theirs to make.

So they either make none or they make the wrong ones and step on someone else’s toes.

And what happens next? Silos emerge naturally.

Single-function teams put more focus on their own stuff cross-functional collaboration requires clarity about who does what. Without it, every interaction becomes a negotiation and that’s harder than getting on with your own work.

Marketing doesn’t know what they can expect from the product team. Product doesn’t know where their responsibility ends and the engineering team’s begins.

So everyone retreats to their corner and focuses on what they can control.

People communicate constantly but ineffectively.

Slack is red hot. Sync meetings crowd our calendars. It all looks productive.

But in reality nobody has the right context because role clarity creates valuable understanding about who needs to know what.

When you know what someone’s accountable for, you understand why they’re asking questions, what decisions they need to make and what information they need from you.

Without that clarity, communication is often just noise.

The kind of changes you need to make as you scale become sources of interpersonal tension rather than opportunities for growth.

Because when roles were fuzzy to begin with, any change feels like a personal slight rather than a structural adjustment.

“Why is Sarah now doing what I used to do?” becomes a question burdened with emotion rather than a simple clarification of responsibilities.

And then there’s accountability. Or more specifically, the lack of it.

Nobody holds anyone accountable because it’s not clear who should be held accountable for what.

And ironically no-one knows who should be doing the holding to account either (this is all getting a bit meta).

The patterns I recognise through my work are things slipping and deadlines coming and going. The same few heroes step forward every time to save the day (most founders will know exactly who I’m talking about in their businesses).

You get stuff done, but resentment builds. Those heroes burn out or leave. Everyone else feels a bit useless. A culture that felt entrepreneurial feels like it’s drifting away from you.

The actual value you’re creating in your business gets lost.

Trust erodes when people don’t know what to expect from each other. You can’t trust someone to do their job if you don’t know what their job is.

You can’t rely on someone if you’re not sure whether they’re supposed to be doing the thing you need them to do.

I could continue, but you get the gist: lots of unwelcome things are the inevitable consequence of poor role clarity as you scale.

The good news? It’s fixable. Not easy, but fixable.

Start by defining roles around outcomes you want rather than activities that currently happen.

Use role scorecards regularly in 1:1s to create a shared understanding about what someone needs to achieve.

Share these so everyone knows everyone else’s role.

Make accountability explicit.

Create clarity about decision rights.

Create space and habits for holding to account. These might be 1:1s, check-ins, personal dashboard – choose your approach, do it often and consistently.

But before you embark on these things, you have to acknowledge the problem exists. So here’s my question to reflect upon – which of these symptoms are showing up in your business right now?

And more importantly, what are you going to do about it?