Writing a Role Description

Imagine three different employees are each asked what the Storekeeper actually does. One says "orders fabric." One says "counts stock." One says "whatever needs doing in the store." When a shortage goes unnoticed for weeks, nobody can say whose job it was to catch it, because nobody ever wrote down what the job actually was. The role existed. A description of it never did.

A role description is the written answer to "what exactly is this job, what can this person decide, and how will we know if they're doing it well?", the document that turns everything Chapters 1–6 discussed into something a real person can be handed on day one.

Notice this is Volume 02's Six Questions applied to a person instead of a task, the same discipline, one level up.

Ready-to-use version: Role Description Template

A role's purpose should be a single sentence an outsider could use to judge whether a given task belongs to this role at all: "The Production Supervisor exists to keep garments moving through the workshop on schedule and to the quality standard." Anything a manager asks of that role should trace back to that sentence, if it doesn't, either the request is misplaced, or the purpose needs to be rewritten deliberately, not accidentally.

A KPI (Key Performance Indicator, a measure of whether the role is succeeding) must be answerable without an opinion. "Good customer service" is not a KPI. "Fewer than 2 unresolved complaints per month" is. This is exactly Volume 02's fifth question, how is success measured, applied to a whole role instead of one task.

Here's the full version of the Storekeeper story from the start of this chapter.

Asked what the Storekeeper actually did, three different people at MANIAC MINDZ gave three different answers, one said "orders fabric," one said "counts stock," one said "whatever needs doing in the store." No one could name a single KPI. When a shortage went unnoticed for weeks, nobody could say whether it was the Storekeeper's failure, since no one had ever agreed what the role was actually responsible for measuring.

The fix was to write the eight-part description in one afternoon, with the Storekeeper present. A description written about someone without them in the room tends to miss what the job actually involves day to day, so having him there mattered. The exercise surfaced the gap immediately: nobody had ever assigned "weekly stock count reconciliation" to anyone. It wasn't a performance failure; it was a role-description failure.

1. Pick one role in your business with no written description.
2. Sit down with whoever holds it and fill all eight parts of the Role Description Template together.
3. Read the purpose sentence back to them, does it match what they actually spend most of their time doing? If not, revise the purpose or the daily tasks until they align.