By Dr. Meg Hancock & Dr. Ehren Green
(Read Time: 4 Minutes)
As college athletics continues to navigate uncharted waters—marked by revenue sharing, NIL opportunities, and legal settlements reshaping the landscape—athletic departments are feeling the pressure to evolve. Amid budget constraints and shifting expectations, many departments are reorganizing, streamlining operations, and redefining positions. Yet in the midst of this change, one organizational factor is often overlooked role clarity. Role clarity can make or break the success of a restructured department and have major implications for employees.
Why Role Clarity Is Foundational
At its core, role clarity refers to a shared understanding of one’s responsibilities, decision-making authority, and how one’s role connects to the broader mission. In high-functioning athletic departments, role clarity boosts trust, performance, morale, accountability, and retention. In contrast, a lack of role clarity can breed confusion, inefficiencies, disengagement, lack of trust, and conflict— these factors are exacerbated during times of transition.
As departments adapt to a changing college sport industry, staff find themselves with new responsibilities around compliance, education, branding, fundraising, and athlete support. Without clear communication around these changes, team members may struggle to understand their role, how their role fits within the new broader organizational structure and how their role is valued, evaluated, or how they contribute to department-wide goals.
Role Clarity: The Key to Organizational Effectiveness
Clear roles lead to clear expectations—a crucial factor in organizational effectiveness and efficiencies and fair and effective performance evaluations. When employees know what’s expected of them, they can prioritize tasks, track progress, and align their work with departmental and institutional values. For supervisors, role clarity becomes a foundation for meaningful evaluation and employee experiences, allowing feedback to be tied directly to agreed-upon outcomes. As a whole, organizations can operate more effectively and be more efficient – especially with limited resources – when roles are clearly defined and shared.
This is particularly important in a reorganized environment where traditional roles may be blended or split. For instance, if a former marketing director is now overseeing NIL education, they must understand not just what the new responsibilities are, but how success in this area will be defined. Are they being evaluated on athlete engagement? Sponsorship revenue? Social media metrics? Without that clarity, evaluations become subjective and demoralizing. Has their new role been shared with appropriate stakeholders?
Feedback That Builds Trust
Role clarity also empowers constructive feedback—the kind that drives improvement rather than resentment. When roles are ambiguous, feedback can feel arbitrary or unfair. But when roles are well-defined, feedback is perceived as supportive and actionable.
In reorganized departments, it is essential to establish feedback loops that reinforce clarity, growth, and transparency. Supervisors should be equipped to coach staff through evolving expectations, while staff should feel empowered to ask for clarification when responsibilities shift. This mutual accountability helps solidify trust during otherwise uncertain times.
The NIL Era Requires More Than Just New Roles—It Requires Clear Ones
Revenue sharing and the NIL era are not just policy changes—they are cultural shifts that affect how departments operate from the inside out. These are decisions that affect people and relationships! As colleges and university athletic departments move toward more professionalized models that resemble pro sports organizations, the stakes for efficiency and accountability grow higher.
The goal is to create a high-performing, mission-driven athletic department that champions athletes while maintaining compliance and financial sustainability and, ideally, growth. That starts with ensuring that everyone on the team knows their role, understands how they are evaluated, and has the tools and support to be successful. It is also an opportunity to be strategic about the function of each position and the person filling that position.
Recommendations for Athletic Leaders
- Communicate and Set Clear Expectations: Before starting an organizational audit, communicate with all staff why the process is occurring and what the goal is.
- Audit roles and responsibilities. Ensure every position has a current, clearly written job description – ask for the employee’s input. How does the position add value to your athletic department? How does the position support your mission?
- Revisit organizational charts. Eliminate redundancy, but also build capacity. If your “go to” person in a particular position is out, who shares the same knowledge that can step in, answer questions, and triage until the decision maker returns. Also, ensure reporting lines are logical and well-communicated.
- Establish clear KPIs. Define how performance will be measured and communicated, especially for newly defined roles. An athletic director once said, “It’s hard to get rid of mediocrity.” This is leadership’s opportunity to define roles, set expectations, and communicate them. Once you communicate them, it is up to your employees to meet them.
- Train supervisors. Equip them to provide effective feedback grounded in clarity and facts, not assumptions.
- Listen to your team. Regular check-ins can surface confusion before it turns into disengagement or turnover. Include skip-level meetings to allow leadership more insights into how the roles are working together.
In this era of rapid change, clarity is a competitive advantage. College athletic administrators who prioritize role definition and transparent evaluation processes will build departments on trust and with resiliency—but also primed to thrive in the new era of college athletics.
The Pipeline Project 