Sticker on the Forehead for Responsibility

We are really lucky to have Josh Silverman as the President of ScriptEd's Board of Directors. He's a terrific mentor to me and brings a wealth of valuable experience to ScriptEd.

 Josh and I have been chatting a lot lately about how best to manage the growth of ScriptEd's team. One piece of advice he gave me in a recent conversation was the idea of "sticker on the forehead" -- that I should hold one person accountable for an outcome or goal rather than a group of people. For example, if I broke out the big parts of ScriptEd -- volunteer recruitment, curriculum development, volunteer training, fundraising, etc., I should be able to write down each topic on a sticky note and (figuratively) stick it to the forehead of the person on our team who is responsible.

This might sound like a very obvious piece of advice (it did to me as soon as I heard him say it), but it's something I had never really thought about before. As soon as he said it, it made a ton of sense to me.

 I've always believed that giving ownership to people makes them more bought into what ever it is they're working on. Giving one person ultimate responsibility for an outcome helps them develop ownership over the goal. When it's not clear who is ultimately responsible, things can fall through the cracks more easily.

 We're still doing some big picture thinking and team structure for the future, but I hope to incorporate this into ScriptEd's work soon.