As I was headed to bed last night and picking up all those random things that get scattered around the house as soon as the kids come home, I noticed that my sunglasses had been in exactly this same spot for... weeks?

Now, I love rainy days. Really love them but enough is enough already. Here in DC, I think we're on day 45 of straight rain and even Noah is over it.

Aside from the weather, it has been a great week. You? I worked with a new client and their leadership team to get more clarity on their roles and responsibilities. The experience was great and just underscored to me that periodic maintenance in any relationship is critical. This was an incredibly smart and dedicated group that had become too comfortable swimming in each others' lanes-- the downside of organizational collaboration that I described in this previous post.

What worked for them was going through a relatively straightforward role and responsibilities exercise. We started with draft role statements and included sample questions that each function is responsible for answering. For example, "why should customers buy our product?" would be answered by marketing and communications. "What is different about our product?" would be answered by the Product owner.

This approach worked because it was both general enough to encompass a range of activities and specific enough that each lead could imagine themselves responding to the questions.

So today, I have a bunch of maintenance and "to dos" to knock out before we head into the weekend... and a couple more days of rain.