The Two Questions That Cut Through Mission Creep
A KCisms Field Note. A quick detour from the CODEA² series — that series resumes shortly. This one’s a standalone leadership habit worth sharing on its own.
Every leader I know carries a quiet, growing list of things, they’re doing that nobody actually asked them to do. Most of them can’t name a single item on that list without sitting down and thinking about it. That’s the problem. Role drift doesn’t announce itself. It accumulates one reasonable “sure, I’ll handle that” at a time, and by the time it’s visible, it’s load bearing.
I run a two-question audit with my team every quarter to semi-annually to catch it before it gets load bearing. It takes about twenty minutes, a blank page, and a willingness to write down things that might be uncomfortable to say out loud. It is not a performance review. It is maintenance.
The Two Questions
They can go in either order:
Question 1: What am I doing that I shouldn’t be doing?
Question 2: What am I not doing that I should be?
The instruction that matters more than the questions themselves: write down the brainstorm. Don’t think about it — put it on paper. A vague sense of “I feel stretched thin” is not useful data. A written list of eleven specific tasks that don’t belong to you is. The act of writing forces the vague feeling into something nameable, and nameable things can actually be acted on.
Starting Point: The Job Description
I tell my direct reports to use their job description, policy, or directive as the anchor for both questions — but not as the ceiling. Two additional instructions matter here:
● Question 1: compare your actual weekly activity against what’s written. The gap is your mission creep.
● Question 2: don’t just look for deficiencies. Include things you’ve informally picked up and want to keep doing, even if they’re not yet written into your role.
That second point matters more than it looks like it does. An audit that only ever finds fault trains people to dread it. An audit that also surfaces “here’s what I want to formally own” turns the exercise into something people bring things to, not something done to them.
The Multi-Angle Expansion
Here’s where the exercise stops being a personal reflection tool and starts being an organizational diagnostic. Most people run Question 1 and Question 2 against themselves and stop. That catches individual drift. It misses the more expensive failure mode: systemic gaps where everyone assumed someone else had it covered.
Push both questions through two additional lenses:
● Overlap. Is someone else currently doing something that’s actually yours per your job description, policy, or directive? This is not automatically a problem — it might be a perfectly good informal arrangement. But it should be visible and negotiated, not just assumed.
● Orphaned work. Is there something that clearly needs to happen, and nobody — not you, not anyone else — is doing it? Individuals should be encouraged to nominate tasks they believe are theirs by right, even if no one has formally assigned them.
Run against a single person, this produces role hygiene. Run across a whole team and aggregated, it produces something closer to an informal RACI check — without the overhead of building an actual RACI matrix. Overlap and orphaned work both surface naturally in the aggregate, because you’re looking at everyone’s list at once instead of one person’s list in isolation.
The Role Alignment Matrix
Putting all four lenses on one page makes the pattern easier to see — and easier to teach. Two dimensions: whether the task is actually in your role, and who’s currently doing it.
Two of the six cells are healthy and don’t require action — they’re the control group that proves this exercise isn’t just manufacturing problems. The other four are where the real work happens:
Why This Beats a Simple Pro/Con List
A plain “what should I stop / what should I start” list only captures two of these six cells. It misses overlap entirely, and it treats orphaned work as indistinguishable from personal gaps — which means it gets missed, because nobody feels individually responsible for naming it. The matrix format forces the question “who else is touching this?” into the exercise instead of leaving it implicit.
Facilitation Notes for Leaders
A few things I’ve learned running this with direct reports:
● Frame it as hygiene, not evaluation. People will not admit “I’ve been doing something that isn’t mine” if the exercise feels like it’s building a case against them. Say explicitly, before anyone writes anything, that finding mission creep is a normal and expected result — not evidence of poor judgment.
● Let people claim, not just confess. The strongest version of this exercise isn’t leadership assigning orphaned work top-down. It’s a direct report looking at the list and saying “that one’s mine — I’ve wanted it anyway.”
● Watch for identity attachment. Letting go of a task in the Mission Creep cell can feel like losing a piece of professional identity, especially for tenured staff who built part of their reputation around something that technically isn’t theirs anymore. Naming that dynamic out loud before the exercise starts makes people less defensive during it.
● Run it on a fixed cadence, not a triggered one. If this only happens after a problem, it reads as a correction. If it happens quarterly regardless of how things are going, it reads as maintenance — which is what keeps people honest about the small stuff before it becomes a big deal.
The Close
The value of this exercise isn’t in catching people doing the wrong thing. Most people, most of the time, are doing reasonable things for reasonable reasons. The value is in catching the organization assuming the right thing is being done when nobody is actually doing it — and catching the quiet, well-intentioned overlaps that never got a name.
Twenty minutes, a blank page, two questions asked from four angles. Run it quarterly. Write it down.
