The Fog of Role Descriptions

Clearing the Fog: Why “Ensure” Is Quietly Sabotaging Your Role Descriptions

Help A Manager Out: a series on practical management best practices

A few weeks ago I woke up to a light fog outside, not thick enough to blind me, but enough that I'd have driven a little slower and watched the road a little closer. It struck me how much that fog resembles the way most role descriptions read. People aren't lost, exactly. But they're proceeding with caution, because the boundaries of their job are just a little blurry.

The word doing most of that blurring is one you'll find in almost every job description ever written: “ensure.” Ensure the sprint goals are met. Ensure the system is secure. Ensure the code is high quality. It sounds like accountability. It reads like a responsibility. But it tells the person nothing about what to actually do, and vague expectations are exactly where performance problems, scope disputes, and awkward review conversations come from.

This shows up everywhere, in every kind of work. A sales manager writes “ensure sales goals are met.” A plant manager writes “ensure the equipment is maintained.” A controller writes “ensure reconciliations are performed.” A charge nurse writes “ensure patients receive quality care.” Different industries, same fog. And the less visible the work is to a manager (a remote sales rep, a technician on the night shift, a software engineer), the more that role description has to do the job that direct observation would otherwise do.

What “Ensure” Actually Costs a Team

“Ensure” survives in role descriptions because it feels safe to write: it covers the outcome without committing the manager to specifics. But that safety is an illusion. Three things tend to happen downstream:

Scope creep: without a defined action, “ensure quality” can expand to mean anything the manager didn't get around to specifying, and the employee finds out only when they're blamed for missing it.

Surprises at review time: if the description never said how, the annual review becomes a debate about whose interpretation was “right,” instead of a conversation about results.

Silent misalignment: two people can read “ensure systems are secure” and picture completely different weekly routines, and neither will discover the gap until an audit or an incident forces it into the open.

Let the Sun Shine: Turning Fog Into Active Verbs

The fix is the same one I use with every client, regardless of industry: replace the vague outcome word with a specific, active verb that describes what the person actually does, on what cadence, to what standard. Here's what that looks like across a mix of roles:

Notice the pattern: meet, maintain, reconcile, complete, greet, conduct, walk through, review. It doesn't matter whether the role is on a sales floor, a hospital unit, a warehouse, or a codebase; every one of these is an active verb a manager can actually observe and coach against. “What” belongs in the role description. “How” belongs in a standard operating procedure, and mixing the two, or trying to make one document do both jobs, is its own kind of fog.

Why This Matters Even More the Higher You Go: Elliott Jaques and Time Span of Discretion

Here's the part most role description advice misses: fog doesn't just obscure what to do, it obscures how long you should be trusted to do it without checking in. That's the contribution of Dr. Elliott Jaques, the organizational psychologist who spent decades studying why some roles feel like the right level of challenge and others feel either suffocating or overwhelming.

Jaques' central discovery was time span of discretion: the length of the longest task a person can be trusted to carry out on their own judgment before a manager needs to check the results. A bank teller balancing a drawer or a technician resolving tickets might operate on a horizon of days to a few months. A first line manager (a shift supervisor, a store manager, a charge nurse) planning a quarter's targets operates on a horizon measured in months to a year. A director shaping a multiyear expansion, platform strategy, or capital plan is operating on a horizon of several years. Jaques mapped these horizons into strata: broadly, Stratum I roles run from about a day to three months, Stratum II from three months to a year, Stratum III from one to two years, and Stratum IV from two to five years, with the spans continuing to lengthen at the executive levels above that.

This matters directly for role descriptions, because vague, “ensure” style language does the most damage at the levels where the time span is longest. A warehouse associate or a service rep with a foggy responsibility finds out within days or weeks that something's off. A first line manager with a foggy responsibility, “ensure the department runs smoothly,” might not find out they and their boss disagreed on what that meant until the quarter is already over. And a director with a foggy responsibility, “ensure the business scales to meet demand,” might not discover the gap between what they thought they owned and what the CEO expected until a year or two in, when the cost of the misunderstanding is much higher and much harder to undo.

In practice, that means a well written role description should do two things Jaques' work makes explicit: state the active verb (what the person does), and calibrate it to the actual time horizon of the role. A first line manager's responsibilities should read like decisions and deliverables that resolve in weeks to months. A director's responsibilities should read like decisions and deliverables that resolve over one to several years. Writing a director level role with front line verbs leaves them bored and frustrated; writing a front line role with director level ambiguity sets them up to fail. Clarity isn't just about the verb; it's about matching the verb to the level of work, whatever the industry.

What Managers Can Do About It

First, treat the role description as a living document, not paperwork you file away after hiring. Sit down with the person and revisit it at least once a year (more often if the job is changing) and confirm every line still reflects what's actually required. If something's outdated or missing, update it together and have the person formally acknowledge the change, so “nobody told me” stops being a valid excuse on either side.

Second, run every new hire through a real Role Review conversation in week one, not a five minute skim of a PDF, but a walkthrough of each responsibility in plain, active language. This is where you catch the “ensure”s before they ever reach the employee.

Third, calibrate the language to the level of the role before you calibrate anything else. Before writing a single bullet, ask what time horizon this job actually operates on (days, months, a year, several years) and make sure the responsibilities and the level of autonomy match that horizon. A front line role written like an executive's, or an executive's role written like a front line technician's, will fail no matter how clear the verbs are.

“The same way the sun clears away morning fog, clear role description wording clears away doubt and confusion. Your people can still proceed with care, but with boundaries they can actually see.”

The Takeaway

The next time you sit down to write or revise a role description, do a simple search for the word “ensure.” Every time you find it, ask two questions: What specific, observable action is this person supposed to take, and over what time horizon should I trust them to take it without me checking in? Answer both, and the fog lifts.