I’m talking about being blamed for problems and issues without knowing you were accountable in the first place. When that happens, people get discouraged, and may even ultimately quit your team. (View Highlight)
DRI stands for directly responsible individual.
It’s a title given to the person who is ultimately responsible for a decision or making sure a project or tasks is completed. (View Highlight)
New highlights added September 1, 2023 at 12:51 PM
Assigning accountability is important for running an effective team. It can make the difference between success and failure on an important project. (View Highlight)
The larger the group, the more likely people are to defer ownership.
Think about when a mass email gets sent out. Who is supposed to respond? Most likely you’ll ignore the email, thinking someone else will respond. But what if no one else does because everyone else is thinking the same exact thing as you? That’s deferred responsibility in action. (View Highlight)
This issue is easily solved by assigning a directly responsible individual. A DRI has the final say on all questions that arise on a team or in relation to a project. Because individual responsibility is assigned to a single person, nothing will slip through the cracks. (View Highlight)
Assigning a specific individual will allow multiple people to coordinate together better to make sure work doesn’t get repeated. (View Highlight)
When DRIs are defined and well documented, it’s much easier to find out who should be in a meeting, on an email thread, or pulled into a chat. The DRI can then make good decisions to pull in other’s as they see fit because they have the most context on who should be involved. (View Highlight)
Avoiding decision-making bottlenecks is one of a high-performance leader’s more important tasks. Delegating to DRIs is a great way to avoid creating bottlenecks and scale your decision on your team. Assigning a DRI breaks the dependency managers often feel to be the decision maker. (View Highlight)
Avoiding decision-making bottlenecks is one of a high-performance leader’s more important tasks. Delegating to DRIs is a great way to avoid creating bottlenecks and scale your decision on your team. Assigning a DRI breaks the dependency managers often feel to be the decision maker. (View Highlight)
If you’re just getting started with using DRIs, it can tempting to assign a DRI for every single small task. Unfortunately, that can create a lot of work to get your DRI system going initially and people might not adopt it. (View Highlight)
Cross-functional teams are a breeding ground for deferred responsibility because both people could theoretically own a decision or project, but there is true owner. Assigning a DRI for cross-functional teams is always a good idea. (View Highlight)
Adding a new capability into a team or organization can cause miscommunication on who is responsible. Because no one has every own the capability before, it’s inherently unassigned to a DRI. Whenever you’re exploring a new role or project, it’s a good idea to assign a DRI. (View Highlight)
Projects that are going to last awhile or decisions that may take a long time should have a DRI. The reason is because humans are very susceptible to planning fallacy—our tendency to underestimate how long it takes to complete a task and overestimate the time we have to get it done. Making sure there’s a person who is accountable to keep momentum on a project moving forward helps. (View Highlight)
A good leader avoids bottlenecks. But sometimes even good leaders get stretched too thin and start lagging on important decisions. Assigning DRIs and delegating responsibility can help. (View Highlight)
Telling a new person on your team that they are the DRI on a job might seem obvious, but so many people forget to do it. When that person ultimately misses a responsibility they were supposed to do but didn’t know they were responsible for, they’ll be upset and resentful. This is easily avoided by articulating to them that they are the DRI. (View Highlight)
Decide and define DRIs early
A good rule of thumb is to decide the DRI early when starting any new project or internal capability. The reason being is because it will eliminate any ambiguity on who is ultimately responsible for moving everything forward. (View Highlight)
teams defined a DRI for every follow up tasks after a meeting. Knowing that each task would be completed and reported on in a follow up meeting is effective. If you leave a meeting without knowing who will complete specific work, then that meeting was probably a waste of everyone’s time. Even worse, your team will waste more time following up on follow ups in chat or email. (View Highlight)
Realistically, a DRI can be anyone on your team who’s likely to complete the project. It doesn’t need to be a manager or even necessarily the person usually responsible for a type of task. (View Highlight)
New highlights added September 1, 2023 at 12:55 PM
DRIs are exactly the same way. If there isn’t a list of the active DRIs somewhere that’s easily accessible to everyone on the team, you might as well not even be assigning DRIs at all.
Having a central repository of DRIs is key to helping a team scale. (View Highlight)
You don’t need to do anything complicated either. Just list out each owner, their name, and a brief description of what they’re accountable for on the team. (View Highlight)
Another good habit to get into as a team is deciding DRIs for specific tasks after each meeting and including those in the meeting notes. They should also be published on your internal documentation system added into the description of the calendar invite for any follow-up meeting.
Publishing the list of DRIs internally and making them easy to find helps everyone involved in a project or at a meeting remember who was responsible for what. (View Highlight)
