Whose Job Is It Anyway?

One of the stories that has stuck with me from my early training is about four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody. The story is titled “Whose Job Is It, Anyway?” and is the inspiration for this blog as we wrap up looking at threats to team culture.

The story captures many of the threats to team culture that we have discussed, including role clarity, communication, feedback loops and taking ownership. There are a lot of levers that can be pulled to develop a high performing team. Underpinning all of these is communication. The mistake to avoid is thinking communication is only about the passing of information. People need more than information. It is the role of leadership and management to ensure people understand and agree. 

Are your team clear on their job role and responsibilities? Are your communication channels clear and followed? Do you have effective feedback loops? Do people take ownership in your team? How do you give feedback and hold people to account? Often these challenging responsibilities of leadership are the first to be neglected when people get “too busy”. It becomes easy to appease one’s conscience by convincing yourself someone else will do it.

This leads us back to the story I mentioned at the beginning.

This is a story about four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody. There was an important job to be done and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. Somebody got angry about that, because it was Everybody’s job. Everybody thought Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn’t do it. It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have.

How often does this happen in your teams? What could you change or tweak to get a different outcome?

In high performing teams this scenario does not occur, because if there is an ambiguity a team member will ask the questions needed to get clarity. How confident and safe do your team feel to step up and ask questions that may, on the surface, appear “obvious” and/or may risk ruffling a colleagues ‘feathers’ because they may feel called out?

You want a culture where people not only feel safe to ask ‘dumb’ questions and challenging others but also view it as their role and responsibility to do so! When a team understands that success is everyone's job we stop asking the question “Whose job is that anyway?” and replace it with “What can I do to make this happen?”