Work teams: the importance of assigning a person in charge

How many times has it happened to you in your company that the time comes when a task must be completed must be delivered and it is not ready? How many times have you needed to know some specific information and have not found someone to ask? How many times have your employees consulted you because they have no one to refer to? Well, these are some of the situations that happen daily in your company for the sole fact of not defining responsible.

When starting a business, all entrepreneurs assume many different responsibilities and roles. Sometimes it is due to the scarcity of economic and human resources or lack of confidence in delegating tasks, which forces them to have to do many things at once. However, to grow your company, it is important that you learn to delegate functions to your work team and assign people in charge. Especially in tasks that are sure to be easy for you or, on the contrary, those tasks in areas that you do not master.

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But why is it so important? Well, when you ask your team or workgroup for something, and one or more specific responsible parties have not been defined, the chances that the task will not be carried out completely or correctly increases. And it is very likely that when you ask what happened, no one will take responsibility and therefore no one can give you an answer to it. And rightly so, you were not clear, you did not specify a team or task manager.

The work team knows who has to do what task. This visibility of the tasks will allow you to know which tasks follow, which precede them, and who is responsible for each of them. In addition, the fact of defining tasks is necessary so that you can plan your projects efficiently, it will also allow you to have more specific control over the operations carried out by each team. That is, with the assignment of team or task managers you can achieve:

• Increased efficiency: Assigning responsibilities to the members of a project team increases efficiency because having a clear understanding of the roles that each one has within the project allows the person in charge to develop a timeline, for example. This chart will tell you who is in charge of what task and when a specific part of the project is expected to be completed. Therefore, if responsibilities are not assigned, the output of project tasks becomes unclear, vague, and often incomplete.

Assigning managers and other roles also allows team members to get a better idea of who is working on closely related tasks. They can review the to-do list, see which member is completing the assignment, and ask for feedback or ask questions if needed.

• Increased productivity: Productivity is increased when assigned responsibilities are closely aligned with the strengths of team members. Keep in mind that the boost to productivity only comes when all members agree on the responsibilities assigned to them. Employees must also know how to accomplish assigned tasks. You should always carry out a well-thought-out delegation of tasks and this has to be in the presence of all the members of the work team. This will give you the ability to reassign other tasks if necessary.
• Sense of ownership: Assigning responsibilities to team members gives each person a sense of ownership; it will make them involved in the project result, thus increasing their efforts to achieve a quality result. If roles are not assigned, members will work selflessly, individually, and possibly territorially on each part of the project. Team leaders must recognize the success of the tasks to increase this sense of belonging. In addition, leaders must also ensure that the work is distributed equitably to avoid friction, resentment, and stress among some workers.

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Finally, we can conclude that to have an efficient company, productive and that generates a sense of belonging in its employees, it is important to plan. And to plan, there must be people responsible for specific tasks. Always remember that the people who belong to a particular team should receive orders and task assignments from a single source. If not, it is very possible that contradictory tasks will be assigned, that you will not know which to prioritize, and therefore no task will be ready on time, compromising more than one plan in the process or project.