Ready to start the new year with your team fully aligned and crystal clear on their role in achieving your vision?
A little clarity can go a long way in setting the stage for massive success and ensuring you have the right people doing the right things.
In this week's episode of the Lean Out Your Business Podcast, I am taking you behind-the-scenes and sharing what I do to give my team the clarity they need to move the business forward in the most simple and aligned way. I also share a powerful tool you can use with your team to align them to their zone of genius work, called the "Right Fit Responsibilities Evaluation". When things aren’t quite working, we adjust strategically to lighten the load to boost effectiveness and satisfaction across the team.
In this episode, I discuss:
- Clarifying roles and responsibilities for your team
- The power of using a theme for the year
- Setting guiding principles that ensure results
- Identifying areas for personal and team growth
- How to proactively address misalignments
- Ensuring everyone on your team is set up for success
Tune into Episode 211 of the Lean Out Your Business Podcast or keep reading below.
Kicking Off the Year with Focus and Purpose
As a new year begins, bringing your team together for alignment is crucial. My team and I recently held a session designed to revisit our vision, refine our goals, and reconnect with the impact we want to make. Instead of jumping straight into daily tasks, we took a step back to look at the bigger picture.
This exercise is about more than just creating a list of objectives—it’s about reminding everyone why their work matters. Whether your team members are veterans or new to the organization, reestablishing that sense of purpose can inspire and energize everyone for the year ahead.
Establishing a Theme and Guiding Principles
Every year, we choose a theme to anchor our decisions and provide focus. For this year, our theme is “integration”—making room to fully implement and align all the systems, strategies, and initiatives we’ve been building. Along with this theme, we’ve set guiding principles like striving for extraordinary excellence, delivering a world-class client experience, and fully stepping into our next-level vision for the business.
These themes and principles serve as more than just words—they’re actionable frameworks that shape how your team approaches their work. By consistently referencing them throughout the year, you create alignment and ensure everyone understands how to execute on the vision.
Crafting a Vision That Inspires
Your vision is the foundation of everything your business strives to achieve (read more here about forming your vision for the year). At Lean Out Method, we look at our vision through three key facets:
- The Business: The goals and outcomes we’re working toward.
- The Client: The transformation and value we aim to deliver.
- Personal: My evolving role as the business owner and how it impacts my team.
This year, I’ve chosen to take a more hands-on role due to new divisions and certification programs we’re launching. By sharing these shifts with the team, we’ve been able to create alignment and prepare for the changes ahead. Transparency about your vision and how your role evolves helps your team feel connected and engaged with the business’s direction.
The Right Fit Responsibilities Evaluation
A tool we rely on to create alignment is the Right Fit Responsibilities Evaluation. This activity ensures every team member’s responsibilities match their strengths and interests. Here’s how it works:
- Each team member lists their key responsibilities.
- They color-code their tasks based on these categories:
- Green: Tasks they love and excel at.
- Yellow: Tasks they do well but would prefer to delegate.
- Orange: Tasks they don’t enjoy and would rather offload.
- Blue: Tasks they aren’t currently doing but are interested in taking on.
This evaluation uncovers potential misalignments and reveals opportunities for delegation, growth, or hiring. By taking time to reassess roles each year, you empower your team to focus on what they do best while creating space to address any gaps or areas for improvement.
Building a Path to Success
Aligning roles and responsibilities doesn’t just enhance efficiency—it also boosts team satisfaction and engagement. It helps you identify hiring needs, refine roles, and ensure tasks are distributed effectively. Even if hiring isn’t on the horizon, understanding which tasks your team wants to offload allows you to plan for the future.
When team members are working in their zones of genius and feel connected to their work, they’ll be more motivated and invested in achieving your company’s goals.
The start of the year is a powerful time to realign with your vision, refine roles, and set a clear course for success.
If you have not yet taken our Scalability Assessment, I invite you to head to leanoutmethod.com/assessment and take our interactive assessment that's going to help you look at how simple, how sustainable, and how scalable your business currently is.
It includes personalized recommendations of where to focus next to get your time back, to increase your impact, increase your profits, and ultimately step into your rich fulfilled life.
To your success!
by Crista Grasso
Crista Grasso is the go-to strategic planning expert for leading global businesses and online entrepreneurs when they want to scale. Known as the "Business Optimizer", Crista has the ability to quickly cut through noise and focus on optimizing the core things that will make the biggest impact to scale a business simply and sustainably. She specializes in helping businesses gain clarity on the most important things that will drive maximum value for their clients and maximum profits for their business. She is the creator of the Lean Out Method, 90 Day Lean Out Planner, and host of the Lean Out Your Business Podcast.
