Role gap

A role gap is the distance between how a role is expected by the people around it and how the person holding the role understands it. It is not primarily a personality issue. It is a mismatch between role maps: scope, autonomy, priorities and expected results. In SMEs, role gaps are one of the most common hidden causes of friction, delay and failed delegation.

In brief

Ask the founder what the production manager is responsible for, then ask the production manager. In many SMEs, the answers diverge: what the role should decide alone, what it should escalate, what outcomes it owns, and even which activities belong to it.

That divergence is the role gap. It measures the distance between different interpretations of the same role: the person who holds it, the person who manages it, and the people who work beside it.

The point is double. First, role gap explains many organisational conflicts that are wrongly read as personal: disappointment, defensiveness, “lack of ownership”, “not managerial enough”. Second, it can be measured quickly. A vague discomfort becomes an object the company can treat.

Operational definition

The theoretical basis is the classic distinction between expected role, perceived role and enacted role.

The expected role is what others believe the position should do.

The perceived role is what the person in the position believes is expected of them.

The enacted role is what they actually do.

Healthy organisations keep these three layers close enough. Stressed or growing organisations let them drift apart. Role gap focuses especially on the distance between expected and perceived role, using a triangulation of perceptions: the same questions are asked separately to the role holder and to the surrounding roles, then the answers are compared in the open.

A minimal grid covers four dimensions.

Scope: which activities belong to the role. Gaps here produce dropped work and duplication. This is closely related to RACI, which often exposes the gap while assigning responsibilities.

Autonomy: what the role can decide alone and what it must escalate. Gaps here produce both excessive permission-seeking and boundary violations. This is the sibling of unwritten decision rights.

Priorities: what comes first when demands conflict. This is often the most invisible gap, because both sides believe the priority is obvious.

Result: what the role is accountable for and how good performance is recognised. Gaps here produce evaluations experienced as unfair: the person optimises one thing and is judged on another.

The measure is not an absolute score. It is the spread between descriptions. The direction of the spread matters: a manager who sees more autonomy than the role holder perceives is one pattern; the reverse is another.

Why it matters for SMEs

In SMEs, roles often grow by sedimentation rather than design. A person is hired for one task, the task expands, other tasks are added, the company changes around them, and nobody redesigns the role because “we talk to each other”.

The result is that each role exists in several versions at once, one in each person’s head. These versions drift silently until friction makes them collide. The founder feels disappointed: “you should have handled that”. The manager feels bypassed: “that was my decision”. The employee feels judged on expectations that were never made explicit.

The instinctive reading is personal. The structural reading is different: the conflict may be between maps, not characters. Maps can be realigned.

The costliest case is the role gap around new key roles: the first operations director, the manager hired to “professionalise” the company, the second generation entering the business. Expectations are high and definition is low. The typical sequence is predictable: large hopes, six months of misunderstanding, “it did not work”, exit. Often the person did not fail; the role was never made mutually legible.

Measuring the gap around day 90 is usually high leverage. The divergence has already formed, but it has not yet hardened into resentment.

For investors, role gap is a hidden variable behind a familiar post-acquisition problem: strengthened management that does not take hold. Bringing new managers into an SME with sedimented roles creates systematic gaps. Early measurement separates rare people problems from frequent definition problems.

Observable signals

Role gaps appear in collision phrases: “I thought it was yours”, “I did not know I could decide”, “nobody told me that mattered”.

They appear when the same conflict repeats with different people in the same role. If three successive managers “failed” in the same way, the defect is probably in the role definition, not in selection.

They appear in evaluations that feel unfair to people acting in good faith.

A more subtle signal is asymmetrical surprise. The manager is surprised by what the role holder does not do; the role holder is surprised by what the manager expected. These are the two sides of the same gap.

Growth and reorganisation multiply the signals because roles change in practice faster than mental maps update.

Common mistakes

The first mistake is the documentary cure: writing a job description and assuming the gap is closed. A job description describes the role expected by its author. It does not automatically touch the other person’s perception. Without comparison of maps, it often adds a third version to the two existing ones.

The second mistake is hierarchical collection. Asking people to describe their role in a meeting, in front of the manager, hides the gap. People describe the role they believe the manager wants to hear. Independent sources are essential, for the same reason triangulation is useful elsewhere in diagnostics.

The third mistake is treating the gap as blame. The question is not who misunderstood. Most role gaps are co-produced by expectations that were never made explicit and assumptions that were never checked.

The fourth mistake is measuring without treating. A survey that exposes the gap but does not lead to an alignment conversation creates awareness of misunderstanding without resolving it.

Operational example

A 44-person packaging company hires its first commercial director, an excellent profile, with the stated goal of taking market responsibility away from the founder. After 90 days the climate is already tense. The founder says the director is not assertive enough; the director says the founder is micromanaging.

Before the relationship deteriorates, the company measures the role gap. The same grid — scope, autonomy, priorities, result — is completed separately by the founder, the director and two senior salespeople.

The gaps explain the conflict without blaming anyone.

Scope: the founder expected the director to manage three historical clients directly. The director had deliberately avoided touching them in the first year, believing founder clients should be approached cautiously.

Autonomy: on pricing, the founder believed he had delegated decisions within the price lists. The director perceived every condition as requiring validation because the first two proposals had been revised. The behaviour silently revoked the delegation.

Priorities: the founder expected new client development. The director was reorganising the existing customer base, believing that was the first six-month mandate.

Result: they even had different definitions of a good first year.

None of the gaps required replacing the person. They required four explicit decisions, made in half a day of map comparison. Six months later the collaboration was working, and the founder institutionalised the 90-day role-gap review for key hires.

Diagnostic questions

For the three most critical roles in the company, if the role holder and the manager completed the same grid separately, how different would the answers be?

How many recurring conflicts currently described as personal would remain if scope, autonomy, priorities and result were aligned?

For the last key-role hire, were mutual expectations ever compared openly, or is each side still working from its own version and waiting for the other to guess it?

Practical implications

The practical method is light but structured.

Use a grid of ten to twelve questions on the four dimensions. Ask concrete questions: list the five decisions this role takes without asking; what comes first when X and Y conflict; how do we know at year end that the role worked?

Collect answers separately. Then compare them side by side. Name the gaps without blame. For each gap, make an explicit decision. The job description is useful after this conversation, as a record of the agreement, not before it as a unilateral wish.

The best moments are day 90 after entry into a key role, after reorganisation, after generational transition and periodically for senior roles.

There is also a boundary. Self-administered role-gap work works well for a single pair where both parties want alignment. It works less well when the gap involves the top of the organisation or the whole company. If the founder collects the data, people calibrate their answers to the founder. For a full multi-level scan, the collection should be done by a third party outside the hierarchy.

MARTRO reading

In MARTRO’s reading, role gap is where measurement touches people without psychologising them. It does not measure character, motivation or competence. It measures distance between maps, which is an organisational fact and can be treated with organisational decisions.

Role gap also connects several knowledge clusters. Scope gaps point toward RACI. Autonomy gaps point toward decision rights. Result gaps point toward performance measures. The gap often tells which instrument is needed next.

It also reflects a core principle of the method: divergence between sources is not averaged away. It is made visible and treated, because the gap is the data.

When to go deeper

Go deeper 90 days after key-role entry, after reorganisations, during generational transitions and whenever a “personality conflict” repeats with different people in the same organisational position.

Natural next steps are triangulation, RACI, decision rights and organisational capability.

Frequently asked questions

Is role gap just a missing job description? No. Companies with excellent job descriptions can still have large role gaps. The document describes one version; mental maps may differ. The gap closes through comparison of perceptions. The document is useful afterwards as a record.

How often should it be measured? More by event than by calendar: new key roles, reorganisations, scale changes and recurring friction. For senior roles, a light annual check can be useful.

Can role gap be measured internally? Yes for limited cases where trust is high and the parties want alignment. For organisation-wide assessment, especially involving the founder or top team, independent collection is safer.

Why does it matter in due diligence or post-acquisition? Because management strengthening often fails not from lack of talent but from unaligned role maps. Measuring role gaps early reduces the risk of replacing people when the real problem is role definition.