For leaders of entrepreneurial organizations, nothing is more important or challenging than building the right team.

Startups and small businesses are dynamic environments that require people to think on their feet, identify challenges, and take unilateral action on a regular basis.

That’s why we’ve abandoned traditional job descriptions at my company, BodeTree. Instead, every employee shares the simple, ten-word job description: “Figure out what needs to be done, and do it.” Here’s why.

Creating a culture of empowerment

While many leaders pay lip service to the concept of empowerment, they rarely create the infrastructure and culture necessary to make it a reality.

I’ve learned time and time again that expectations need to be made exceptionally clear. Inside of any organization, ambiguity is the enemy of decisive action.

Leaders who are truly committed to empowerment must make it clear to team members that they’re willing to accept the outcome of a decisive action, be it good or bad.

When I say that I want my team to “figure out what needs to be done and do it,” I mean it. Sometimes that means we’ll make mistakes, but that is okay. I’d rather make a mistake than never take action.

We’re not a coin-operated organization

Steve Jobs once remarked that “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”

That is a sentiment that I take to heart and try to instill in my team. All too often, team members revert to what I call a “coin-operated” approach where they want to be told what to do in any given situation.

The truth, however, is that I didn’t hire my team so that I could pass out assignments to them. Instead, I hired them because I respect their insight, intelligence, and potential. I want them to tell me what we should do, not the other way around.

Our radical approach to job descriptions and functional areas is designed to reinforce the notion that we are not a coin-operated operation. Instead, I expect our team to be cross-functional, self-motivated, and creative.

The key to running a lean team

The virtues of running a lean organization have been well documented over the years, but unfortunately, it is often easier said than done.

Organizations have the tendency to creep in size and overhead as time goes on. In many cases, this is due to traditional siloed job descriptions. As soon as team members start waiting for direction or think in terms of their individual functional areas, the organization becomes less efficient and, by definition, more expensive to run.

When you foster a culture where people are expected to figure out problems for themselves and take action, regardless of functional area, it becomes a force multiplier. Ten self-motivated, smart, and engaged employees can be as productive as a hundred.

That’s why startups and entrepreneurial organizations have the opportunity to disrupt well-established industries and compete with organizations that are several times larger.

Building a self-sustaining company

At the end of the day, the decision to do away with detailed job descriptions comes down to fostering personal accountability and setting team members up for success.

I hired smart people so that we can create something greater than the sum of its parts. I realized that it is counterproductive and damaging to box them into a set of predefined tasks.

This article was first published on Forbes