Hey, it's Rachel Cook, your modern mentor. I'm the founder of Lead Above Noise, a firm

specializing in helping teams and organizations optimize their working experience. Some days,

working with teams feels more like doing family therapy than anything else, which, by the way,

I am profoundly unqualified to do. But still, my family, full

disclosure, is kind of zany. The uncles, the cousins, I mean, honestly, how I share DNA with any of them

is one of life's great mysteries. You know, come to think of it, everyone I know seems to have a

zany family. But no one I've ever met

is the zany one. Are you smiling? Does this kind of resonate with you? Is everyone in your

family but you kind of quirky in some way? This same phenomenon shows up in teams as well.

When anything goes wrong, like a ball gets dropped or a deadline is missed

or a project has to be reworked, we all point fingers at everyone else, never at ourselves.

And while I cannot help on the kooky family front, just let Uncle Ellen do that weird juggling

thing and keep the matches locked away. I do have some tricks at my sleeve

to help a team find its way from finger pointing to real solutions. This reality, this something

going wonky in the workplace followed by fingers pointing every which way, always signals to me

that role clarity or lack thereof is probably your culprit.

We all generally strive to do a good job. And when something fails, it's more often a failure

of clarity, like who owned that decision or that responsibility than it is a failure of

individual performance. And infusing even a little bit of clarity into a team's roles and

responsibilities can make a huge difference. I do this work with teams pretty often, and I'd love to

share how I approach getting them to clarity. If your team is struggling with role clarity,

with dropping balls or stepping on toes or missing deadlines

...