What Are You For? Writing Your Own Role Definition
Last month I wrote about where a leader's time actually goes, and the exercise that shows you. Most people who run it land somewhere near fifteen percent on the work only they can do, and almost everyone thinks that work is higher. Because that is where they spend their time.
The number is useful. It is not the finding.
The finding is the reason the month took that shape, and it is almost always the same reason.
Founders write every job description in the organization.
Almost none of them write their own.
That sounds like an oversight and it is closer to a structural inevitability. A job description gets written when someone needs to hire for a role, describe it to a candidate, or evaluate the person in it. None of those apply to the person at the top. So, the role never gets defined, and an undefined role does not stay empty.
It fills with whatever asks loudest.
What happens instead
The role becomes an accumulation. Sales, until there was a salesperson, and then partly sales anyway because the big accounts still call you. Operations, until it broke and you fixed it, and now you own it. Hiring. The client escalation. The system nobody else understands.
Every one of those arrived for a good reason. None of them arrived through a decision about what your role should be.
Here is the part that costs the most. Without a definition, every request that lands on you is equally valid. There is nothing to hold it up against. So, the loudest request wins, every time, and saying no feels like a personal failing rather than a structural boundary.
That is why leaders who cannot define their own role work more hours and feel worse about it. They are not weak. They are undefended.
The four questions, turned around
Earlier this year I wrote about defining what good looks like in a role, using four questions.
What is this role here to produce?
What does good look like when it is happening?
What is the signal you would watch because of the outcome?
What is the trap you would otherwise measure because it’s convenient?
Turn them on yourself.
What is your role here to produce?
Not what you do. What the organization gets because you are in that seat and not somebody else.
For most founders the honest answer involves two or three things.
The direction nobody else can set.
The relationships nobody else can hold.
The decisions where the consequences land on you personally.
Write one sentence. It will take longer than you expect, and the difficulty is the finding.
What does good look like when it is happening?
In behavior, not adjectives. Not "engaged." Instead: the leadership team makes decisions without routing them to me, and I find out at the update rather than in the moment.
Not "strategic." Instead: I spend a full day a month on next year, and it does not get bumped.
What is the signal you would watch?
One or two. For a leader the most useful signals are usually about what is not happening. How often decisions come to you that should not. How long the work only you can do sits before it moves.
What is the trap?
Hours worked. Availability. Transactions. How needed you feel.
That last one is worth sitting with. Feeling needed is pleasant and it is a terrible measure of whether you are doing your job. A leader whose organization cannot function without them daily has not proven their value. They have described a design flaw.
The test
Once you have the page, do not file it. Use it on the next request that arrives.
Hold it up. Does this serve what the role is for?
Sometimes it does and you take it. Sometimes it clearly does not, and here is what changes. Saying no stops being about you. It is not that you do not want to help. It is that this is not the thing you are for, and there is a written page that says so.
That page is not bureaucracy. It is the fence that makes the important work possible on a week when everything is urgent.
Then hand it to someone
Give it to your leadership team, or your board, or the person who knows your week best.
Let them argue with it. A definition that survives being questioned will hold when things get busy. One that has never been tested will not.
They will also tell you something useful, which is where your written role and your actual week have diverged. They can see it more clearly than you can, and most of them have never been invited to say so.
Start here
One page. One sentence for what the role produces, a short description of what good looks like, one or two signals, and the trap.
It takes about an hour and almost nobody has done it.
If you want to work through it with someone who will push on the answers, that is what I do. Let's have a conversation.
Find the real problem. Do the real work. Build what lasts.
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