The Performance Gap: Issue 16

Last week I wrote about the accountability paradox - the pattern in which senior teams that are rigorous about individual performance rarely apply the same rigour to themselves collectively. This week a related structural problem: what happens when the boundaries between senior roles are unclear, and why the cost is usually felt much further down the organisation than most leaders realise.

Role ambiguity at the top is not usually about unclear job descriptions.

It is about the boundaries between senior leaders that have never been explicitly negotiated: who owns this decision, who has authority here, whose view takes precedence when functions overlap. In a sufficiently complex organisation, these overlaps are everywhere. The question is whether they are handled through explicit agreement or through repeated, low-grade friction that nobody quite names.

Most organisations choose the latter, because naming the friction requires a conversation that feels risky. The result is ambiguity that is managed informally, inconsistently, and at significant cost.

What the research shows

The evidence on role clarity is consistent. Hackman's research on team conditions identified structural clarity (clear roles, clear norms, clear decision rights) as one of the most powerful predictors of team effectiveness. Ambiguity is not a minor inconvenience. It is a tax on every interaction where the boundary matters.

Marcia Blenko, Michael Mankins and Paul Rogers, writing in the Harvard Business Review on decision effectiveness, found that the single most important factor in organisational decision quality was not process or data, but clarity about who owns the decision. Organisations with clear decision rights significantly outperformed those without them, independent of almost everything else.

The mechanism is straightforward. When decision rights are unclear, decisions take longer, consume more energy, and produce less commitment from those who were uncertain of their role in making them. The same person who was energised by a decision they owned is disengaged by a decision they were adjacent to.

How ambiguity travels down

The other consequence of role ambiguity at senior level is that it creates a permission structure for the same ambiguity in the levels below. When direct reports observe that their own leader's relationship with a peer is poorly defined (that territory is contested, that decisions are remade after they have been made, that the same question gets different answers from different parts of the senior team) they learn that the same behaviour is acceptable for them.

The friction that looks like a middle management problem is usually a senior team problem that has travelled. By the time it is visible, it is expensive.

What clarity actually requires

Clarity does not mean rigid lines. In a complex organisation, flexibility matters and some overlap is productive. What it requires is that the areas of overlap are acknowledged rather than avoided, and that the norms for navigating them are agreed rather than assumed.

This is a conversation most senior teams have never had explicitly. Not because they are unwilling, but because the right moment to have it never quite arrives, and the cost of not having it is diffuse enough to be deniable.

The question for this week

Where in your senior team is there a boundary that everyone knows is contested but nobody has named? What would it take to have that conversation, and what is the current cost of not having it?

Issue 17: How teams make decisions - the gap between the process teams believe they are using and the one they are actually using.

If something in this issue resonated and you'd like to think it through in the context of your own organisation or leadership - a Chemistry Session is a free 30-minute conversation. No pitch, no obligation. Book here.

Dr Andrew A Walker | Chartered Psychologist | Leadership Coach | andrewantonywalker.com