For years, I made it a practice to ask the leaders who worked for me to evaluate me.
Not their performance. Mine.
I would give them an assessment with several questions about my leadership, including one that mattered perhaps more than any of the others: What is one thing I could improve?
One year, more than one person gave me essentially the same answer. They needed a clearer understanding of their responsibilities. They weren’t always sure exactly what belonged to them, what belonged to someone else, or where the boundaries of their roles were.
In the language I use today, they didn’t know their lane.
That feedback was a gift.
I could have looked at those leaders and thought, “You have a job description. You should know what you’re responsible for.” But if multiple people on my team were telling me they didn’t have clarity, the problem wasn’t theirs to solve. It was mine.
I had not communicated clearly enough.
In hospitality especially, the lines can become blurry very quickly. We help each other. We jump in. We solve the problem in front of us because the guest doesn’t care which department owns it.
That kind of teamwork is important. But teamwork and unclear accountability are not the same thing.
When people don’t know their lane, they spend energy trying to figure out where they’re supposed to be. Decisions get delayed. Responsibilities overlap. Things get missed because everyone assumes someone else owns them. Eventually, good people can begin to question their own performance when the real problem is that no one ever clearly defined what success looked like for them.
As leaders, we sometimes believe we’ve communicated something simply because we’ve said it. Those assessments taught me that communication isn’t measured by what I said. It’s measured by what the other person understood.
I became much more intentional about delineating responsibilities. What do you own? What decisions are yours to make? Where do you need support? Where does your lane intersect with someone else’s? Most importantly, do you understand what success looks like in your role?
When those answers are clear, people stop waiting for permission for things they already have the authority to handle. They become more confident in their decisions. Accountability becomes fairer because expectations were established before performance was measured.
Clear communication isn’t about controlling every move someone makes. In fact, I believe it does the opposite. It gives people room to lead.
One of our responsibilities as leaders is to create an environment where the people around us have the clarity they need to be successful. Sometimes discovering where that clarity is missing requires something equally important: being willing to ask them.
I asked my leaders what I could do better. They told me. My job was to listen.
And because they did, I became a better leader.