The Starting Point

Take an Inventory.

Before you can own your activation, you need an inventory.

Most people lack something as basic as a list of their responsibilities.

They have an org chart showing their reporting line. They have a job description listing their responsibilities. And they assume those two things describe their actual work.

That's rarely true.

And here's where you glimpse the next level: Your job description rarely defines your actual value-add.

Your actual responsibilities—the specific outcomes you're accountable for—are more discrete and tangible than your job description suggests. You contribute to the weekly call where the accounting lead is driving process improvements. You provide the analysis the finance director depends on for board reporting. You're part of the cross-functional systems migration led by the CIO's office. Each of these is a structural responsibility: someone owns the larger outcome, and you own a piece of it.

Your actual universe of responsibilities rarely aligns perfectly with an organization chart.

Here's where you start: take stock.

Identify the specific, tangible outcomes you're accountable for. Not vague role duties. The discrete pieces of work where someone is depending on you to help achieve their goal.

For each one, ask yourself: Who is depending on me - who owns the larger goal I'm contributing to?

That person is who you'll talk to about defining the responsibility you own. But first, you need the list. You need to see the landscape clearly.

Once you have the list

Now it's time to schedule those 1:1 activation meetings.

In those meetings, you can readily define the responsibility you own in that relationship. What exactly are you accountable for? What authorities do you have? What constraints matter? What does success look like?

Right now, those responsibilities might be fuzzy. You might know roughly what's expected. Or you might be operating on assumptions that haven't been tested.

The next post shows you what a clear responsibility actually looks like—the elements that make it real and actionable. And after that, we'll walk through how to establish those responsibilities in conversations with the people who depend on your help.

But rest easy. Many of those conversations will be straightforward. You might already be discussing these everything that matters. The goal is to simply make explicit what's already implicit. Some meetings will require more depth. But the starting point is the same: making visible what's already real.

Trust me - this is a discussion that leaders appreciate because it makes their lives easier.