Someone on the team comes and asks whether to accept this return. A quarter of an hour later someone else asks how much discount to give this customer. By the end of the day ten small decisions of exactly that kind have piled up on your desk.
None of them is hard, and you answer each one in seconds, but all of them wait for you because nowhere is it written who those decisions belong to. What you are missing is a job description, though not the kind that comes to mind when you hear the words.
How is a job description different from a job ad?
You write a job ad for the outside, to attract someone. A job description is for the inside, so that once that person has arrived it is clear what you want from them. That is why one is full of marketing lines about a dynamic workplace and the other has to say, plainly and precisely, what result this role is meant to produce.
Most of the templates you find are a long list of tasks: answering customers, logging orders, chasing deliveries, coordinating with suppliers. That list only says how the person fills their day. It does not say what result they are responsible for or where they are allowed to decide for themselves, which are precisely the two things whose absence sends the work back to your desk.
Where exactly does a small team break?
When there are three of you, everyone does a bit of everything, and that is not a flaw at all. It is what gives you speed and means anything left undone gets picked up by whoever is free. The trouble starts when the team reaches six or seven and that same flexibility turns into ambiguity.
From then on two situations keep repeating. Either two people each assume the job belongs to the other and nobody does it, or they both do it and one of them has wasted their time. The symptom is something you see every day: the queue that forms at your desk so the work can be sorted out.
Every time I sit down with a team of several people and ask who owns a particular job, two or three of them look at each other. That look means the roles were never made clear and the business is running on an accidental structure nobody designed.
The real question is who holds which decision
A job description that actually works answers two questions instead of listing tasks: what result is this role responsible for, and how far can it decide without asking you. The second question matters more, and it is almost never written down.
Picture a shop where your salesperson knows the job is selling, but does not know how far the price can come down, on what terms a return is accepted, or up to what amount a discount can be given without your approval. Until those three numbers are written, every customer who haggles interrupts you once.
The moment you write those few rules down with actual numbers, the decision comes off your desk and sits on the role, and that is where the business’s dependence on you starts to fall. Note that this is not handing over responsibility, it is handing over authority, because someone who does the work but has to ask about every decision is still taking up your time.
What goes into a half-page job description?
There is no need to hunt for a multi-page form full of legal clauses, because for a small team half a page that is clear beats ten pages nobody opens. Five sections are enough:
- The purpose of the role in one sentence. What this role exists for, and what would be left undone if it sat empty for a month.
- Three to five results it owns. Write results, not activities: orders delivered on time, rather than coordinating with the courier.
- The decisions it makes itself, with their ceilings. The actual numbers and conditions, like a discount up to ten percent or a return within seven days of purchase.
- The things it has to ask about. A short list of exceptions that are yours to decide, so that everything else is clearly theirs.
- Where the work comes from and where it goes. Which roles it works with and who receives its output.
Do not write those five sections alone at your desk. Write them with the person who does the job every day, because they know the real decisions and the real snags, not you. And if you want the same page to serve the next person too, put the documentation of that job beside it so each step is clear.
Where to start
Do not write job descriptions for every role at once, because you will abandon it half done. Instead, spend a week noting down every question people bring you, then at the end of the week see which role most of them belong to, and start there.
That single page usually removes half of those questions and shows you that the other roles can be made just as clear. If you want to work out which role to write first and which decisions can come off your desk, we find it together in a free diagnostic session.