When everybody's job is nobody's job

Most of us have worked somewhere with roles and responsibilities as clear as mud. Nobody knew which direction to point or where to put the investment. People spun too many plates, lost sight of which ones mattered, and then the plates fell.

Some time ago I worked with a company that had got itself into exactly this state. This is what was wrong, and what we did to turn it around. The diagnosis will be familiar to anyone who has been inside a struggling business. The fix is harder than it sounds.

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What was wrong

No collective strategy. Without one, three things happened at once. Teams worked hard but in different directions, each function convinced it was helping while together they produced very little. Resources went to whoever shouted loudest, not to what mattered most. And nobody could tell whether the company was making progress, because there was no benchmark to measure it against.

Unclear roles. Decisions either stalled or were made by the wrong people. Projects duplicated effort or fell into the gap between two teams, each assuming the other was handling it. Performance could not be evaluated because accountability had never been assigned.

Everybody's job was nobody's job. This did the most damage. When everyone is nominally responsible for everything, nothing gets done well. People spread themselves across too many things, burned out and left. The most important work had no clear owner and sat undone.

A divided executive team. Rather than holding the company together, the leadership team was itself a source of mixed messages and competing priorities. Staff watched their leaders at odds and stopped trusting any direction that came from above.

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What we did, and in what order

The sequence mattered as much as the content.

The executive team first

Nothing else was going to work until the executive team worked. We started there: structured coaching, a deliberately built shared vision, and a clear decision-making process that removed any ambiguity about who owned which calls. A dysfunctional leadership team cannot lead a functional organisation. Investing in everything else first is waste.

A strategy the whole company shaped

Next we built a collective strategy with input from across the company, not just the leadership layer. We set short and long-term objectives connected to a visible vision. Roles and responsibilities were defined explicitly, with job descriptions that set out expected outcomes and performance measures, not just task lists. Accountability was assigned to individuals, not to teams or functions.

Incentives last, but not least

The incentive structures came last but mattered disproportionately. The old structures rewarded individual department performance in ways that actively discouraged cross-functional collaboration. Realigning what was recognised and rewarded with what the company actually needed changed behaviour more durably than any process change had.

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What happened

The company turned around and the syndrome went away. Confusion became clarity, inefficiency became productivity, and aimlessness became strategic action.

The most important move was the first one. A cohesive, aligned executive team was the precondition for everything else. Every other intervention built on that foundation. Without it, none of them would have held.

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Four things worth taking seriously

For boards: if the executive team is sending mixed messages, fix that before funding anything else. A divided leadership team cannot lead a functional organisation.

For chief executives: make sure a collective strategy exists and gives people a benchmark for progress. Without one, hard work goes in different directions and resources go to whoever shouts loudest.

For managers: assign accountability to named individuals, not to teams or functions, and write job descriptions around outcomes rather than tasks.

For anyone designing incentives: check whether you are rewarding departments in ways that punish collaboration. Changing what is rewarded can shift behaviour more durably than any process change.

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Which piece of important work in your organisation belongs to everybody, and so, in practice, to nobody?