In a large organisation, job titles can tell you quite a lot.
In an SME, they may give you a bit of legitimacy when talking to customers. They may occasionally do something for the ego.
But most of the time, they feel more like a rough suggestion of what you might be responsible for.
A manager might spend the morning discussing the production plan, machine breakdowns and absenteeism; the afternoon looking at funding opportunities and purchasing forecasts; and the final half-hour trying to work out why a spreadsheet that worked perfectly yesterday has suddenly decided not to.
And in a family-owned business, the boundaries can become even less obvious.
That isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
In fact, I think it’s one of the reasons smaller businesses can be so adaptable.
But it does create some interesting management problems.
The SME superpower
One of the great advantages of working in a smaller business is that people rarely say:
“That isn’t my job.”
And, in my experience, the people who do tend to say it too often don’t usually stick around for very long.
If something needs doing, somebody generally gets involved.
People build knowledge far outside their formal role.
Managers develop a much broader understanding of the business because they’re exposed to problems that would probably be handled by completely separate functions in a larger organisation.
And when things go wrong, you can often solve them remarkably quickly.
There’s a tremendous amount of organisational resilience in that.
Someone is on holiday?
Another person knows enough to keep things moving.
Customer problem?
Get the right people around a table.
Machine breakdown?
Production, maintenance, purchasing and management can all be discussing it within minutes.
You don’t necessarily need a cross-functional steering committee meeting booked for three weeks next Thursday.
Sometimes you just need the people who know what they’re talking about and are willing to give it a go.
That flexibility is incredibly valuable.
Until everyone becomes responsible for everything
The difficulty is that flexibility can gradually turn into ambiguity.
If three people could deal with something, who actually owns it?
Sometimes the answer is obvious.
Sometimes the answer seems to be:
Whoever notices first.
That works surprisingly well for a while.
But as a business grows, it becomes increasingly difficult.
A task sits untouched because everybody assumes somebody else is dealing with it.
Or the opposite happens.
Three people unknowingly work on exactly the same problem.
And there’s another version I suspect many SME managers will recognise.
Nobody is quite sure who owns something, so it gradually moves up the organisation until it reaches somebody who will make a decision.
Usually the same few people.
That’s where blurred responsibility starts creating bottlenecks.
The invisible job description
There’s also a huge amount of work in SMEs that never appears on anyone’s formal job description.
Helping somebody solve a problem.
Chasing information.
Remembering something needs doing.
Explaining how an old process works.
Fixing small issues before they become big ones.
Knowing which supplier to ring.
Knowing which customer will tolerate a delay and which one definitely won’t.
Remembering where the keys to the grit box were put when winter comes around — or, failing that, knowing where to buy another one.
None of these things necessarily appear on a KPI.
But they can be enormously important.
And sometimes the person doing the most valuable work isn’t necessarily the person producing the most obvious measurable output.
That’s one reason I think managers need to understand the informal organisation as well as the formal one.
Who connects departments?
Who knows where information lives?
Who do people trust?
Who spots problems?
Who quietly prevents problems that nobody else ever discovers existed?
Those people often hold organisations together.
Their importance isn’t in the superficial things — job titles, ties, or where their box happens to sit on an organisational chart.
They rarely get much praise for it.
And if you want to know who they are, you probably won’t find the answer on the org chart.
Wearing three hats can be good
I don’t think the answer is rigidly defining every responsibility and telling people never to cross the line.
That would probably remove one of the best characteristics of an SME.
I actually like the fact that roles overlap.
It develops broader managers.
It encourages problem-solving.
It means people understand more of the operation than their immediate department.
And it allows businesses to react quickly.
The issue isn’t that people wear several hats.
The issue is when nobody knows which hat they’re supposed to be wearing at any particular moment.
That distinction matters.
The prioritisation problem
This becomes particularly difficult for managers.
If your role covers operations, people, projects, improvement and whatever emergency has appeared that morning, everything can feel important.
And often overwhelming.
When everything feels important, prioritisation becomes surprisingly difficult.
The urgent tasks usually win.
Production today.
Customer today.
Machine today.
People issue today.
The improvement project that might prevent the same problem happening again?
Tomorrow.
Except tomorrow has its own problems.
And suddenly something you genuinely intended to finish last month is still sitting on your desk — and you’re in a meeting, struggling to find a single coherent reason why it still hasn’t been done other than the fact that, on any given day, it simply never made it to the top of the list.
I think this is one of the biggest traps in operational management.
Being extremely busy can feel productive.
And other people’s perceptions can reinforce that.
We often praise people for how much they have done, rather than asking how efficiently they did it, how much unnecessary effort was involved, or whether the work actually moved the business forward.
Someone rushing from problem to problem can look incredibly productive.
Someone who quietly changes a process so those problems stop happening can look far less busy.
But the second person may have created far more value.
That distinction matters.
Because if all your time is spent proving how busy you are, you never create enough space to improve the system that is keeping you busy in the first place.
Expertise can become dependency
The same problem applies to individuals.
When somebody becomes very good at solving a particular type of problem, the organisation naturally sends more of those problems to them.
Which makes sense.
Until everyone sends everything to them.
Eventually the person who was originally an asset becomes a single point of failure.
Not because they’ve done anything wrong.
Quite the opposite.
They’ve become too useful.
From the business’s point of view, the answer seems obvious.
Share the knowledge.
Document the process.
Train somebody else.
But from the individual’s point of view, that can feel much more complicated.
Smaller organisations aren’t always the most stable places to work.
They can be more exposed to changes in customer demand, market conditions, government policy, tax increases and all the other things that can suddenly turn a comfortable year into a difficult one.
Jobs that felt perfectly secure six months ago might not feel quite so secure when redundancies are being discussed.
And in that environment, knowledge can feel like power.
If you’re the only person who understands how a critical system or process works, sharing that knowledge might feel like giving away one of the things that makes you indispensable.
That’s understandable.
Which means the challenge for a business isn’t simply telling people to share what they know.
It’s creating an environment where they feel safe enough to do it.
Managers need to understand that sharing knowledge shouldn’t reduce someone’s value to the organisation.
Ideally, it should increase it.
The person who can solve the problem is useful.
The person who can solve the problem, explain it, teach somebody else and improve the process is more useful still.
There’s also a wider irony here.
The more knowledge is spread around the organisation, the more resilient that organisation becomes.
And the more resilient the organisation becomes, the lower the risk of the kind of disruption that leads to redundancies in the first place.
So the goal shouldn’t be eliminating experts.
It should be making sure expertise strengthens the organisation rather than becoming trapped inside one person.
Clarity without bureaucracy
As with most of these problems, the obvious solution is documentation.
Job descriptions.
Responsibility matrices.
Procedures.
Organisation charts.
Forms.
And all of those things can help.
But then comes another set of questions.
Who is going to produce all that paperwork?
How much time are they supposed to spend doing it?
Who keeps it updated?
How much does that time cost?
And perhaps most importantly:
What is the benefit actually worth?
It’s easy to assume that more documentation automatically means a better-managed business.
It doesn’t.
Documentation has a cost, even if that cost doesn’t appear as a line on an invoice.
Someone has to create it.
Someone has to maintain it.
Someone has to read it.
And every hour spent documenting something is an hour that person isn’t spending somewhere else.
That doesn’t mean documentation is a bad thing.
Far from it.
But I think businesses sometimes focus so heavily on the tangible output — we now have a procedure, a form, a matrix, a policy — that they forget to ask whether any of it has actually made work easier.
The real question isn’t:
“Have we documented this?”
It’s:
“Has documenting this reduced risk, improved clarity, saved time or made the operation more resilient?”
If the answer is yes, it’s probably worthwhile.
If nobody reads it and nothing changes because of it, you may simply have created another task.
Or, as I said in the first article:
The same problem — plus a form.
Maybe three hats is the point
I sometimes wonder whether we spend too much time trying to make SMEs behave like larger organisations.
Perhaps wearing three hats isn’t a failure of organisational design.
Perhaps it’s part of the model.
The flexibility, shared knowledge and willingness to cross boundaries are often exactly what allow smaller businesses to compete with much larger ones.
The challenge is preserving that flexibility without allowing it to become confusion.
People should be able to help outside their role.
Managers should understand more than their own department.
Knowledge should move around the organisation.
But underneath all that flexibility, there still needs to be enough clarity that everyone knows where responsibility ultimately sits.
Because wearing three hats can make someone incredibly useful.
Wearing three hats while simultaneously wondering which job is actually yours?
That’s when things get complicated.
And, like so much else in an SME, you probably won’t find the answer on the organisation chart.
