13.12 Roles and Responsibilities

< Day Day Up >

Here, your objective is quite simple. It is to transform the beneficiary's attitude from "what are you going to do for me?" to "how can I help?" As you outline your implementation strategy to the beneficiaries, you must identify the tasks for which you assume responsibility and those you clearly associate with them or are hopeful they will assume. I am not ashamed to say to a beneficiary, "It would really be a great help if your team could do tasks 15, 16, 19, and 25 because you are better positioned to do them based on your knowledge and experience. I could use your help on many of the others, but the way I see it, those four are really going to kill me to get done right unless you chip in. How can we work that out?"

That might sound presumptive, but as the old sales cliché goes: "You will not get the order if you do not ask for it!" Document these discussions candidly, ensuring everything is discussed, agreed upon, and published to the world. These are hard questions to ask and get answers for, but the consequences of not doing so leads to a lot more grief than the pushback you get when you do insist on specificity in this area.

< Day Day Up >