In the companies I work with, directors usually invite me in because of „bad communication" or „unresolvable conflict". Within the first two hours, it's almost always something else: nobody knows exactly who decides what, who informs whom, and by when.
Unclear responsibilities are one of the most expensive line items in a company — and they never appear in any financial report. Why? Because they dissipate into other costs: overtime, doubled tasks, meetings without conclusions, personnel changes that don't solve anything.
Three signs that responsibilities aren't clear
Sign one: decisions keep coming back to the director because nobody else makes them. People are capable, but they wait.
Sign two: when something fails, multiple people say „that's not mine". Formally they're right. Functionally the company stops.
Sign three: meetings end with agreements nobody executes. Next time the conversation starts again, as if the previous one hadn't happened.
Why writing an org chart isn't enough
Many companies answer this with a new organisational chart. The document is produced, signed, and nothing changes. Why?
Because the org chart describes where people sit. It doesn't describe how decisions are made, where information stops, and who first sees that something is off plan. A company is a living system, not an org-chart pyramid.
What works in practice
Things start to move in my engagements when we talk about three layers at once:
- Processes: what path a task takes from start to finish, and where it stalls.
- Roles: who decides, who executes, who informs, who reviews.
- Commitments: how agreements are made, who owns them, by when, and what „done" means.
Only when these three align does responsibility actually live in the company, rather than being written down in a handbook.
An unfinished conclusion
Clarity of responsibility isn't an administrative task. It's the most underrated source of operational relief for a director. Once aligned, the leader suddenly has time for the work they were actually hired to do.
That's the moment a company starts to grow without the leader's extra energy.
O avtorici
mag. Martina Šavron
Svetovalka in mentorica za stabilizacijo ekip, procesov in odgovornosti v malih in srednjih podjetjih. Z več kot 27 leti izkušenj pri vodenju, organizaciji in odločanju.