What belongs to the teammate.
What is inside the work and what is outside it, so nobody has to guess whether a new request belongs to her.
Teammates / Mandates
Put a teammate in charge of it.
A mandate is the standing brief for a responsibility a Busy teammate carries over weeks or months. It sets the boundary of the work, the result it is meant to produce, who on your side is accountable, and how far she may act before she comes back to ask. She works it between your check-ins and reports on the cadence you set.
Carried for weeks at a timeAuthority written downResults on a cadence
See the anatomyThe ownership layer
A task ends. A responsibility keeps needing someone.
Ask for a deliverable and you get the deliverable, once. Hand over a mandate and the teammate has somewhere to return to every day: work to move, a measure to check, a risk to raise, and a reason to come find you when something crosses the line you drew.
Some mandates are standing responsibilities that run as long as the company does. Others are one-off initiatives with an end date — opening the new warehouse, migrating the vendor list. Either way the authority you delegated is written down, and you can narrow it again in a sentence.
Anatomy of a mandate
Eight fields, filled in before she starts.
What the work is meant to change.
A standing responsibility runs as long as it needs to. A one-off initiative carries an end date. Both name the result they are after.
What she may do without asking.
One recorded rung: act inside the guardrails, draft for review, recommend only, or stop and escalate.
Who owns each side of the work.
Responsible, accountable, consulted, informed — named people, so there is always someone to escalate to.
How progress gets proven.
The measures or key results chosen for this mandate, their target, where they stand now, and the date that reading came from.
When the work recurs.
The daily check, the weekly brief, the monthly review — attached to the work itself, so they happen without anyone scheduling them.
Whether the work is moving safely.
Ongoing, at risk, paused or complete, with the reason sitting next to the status instead of in someone's head.
Where she works and what changed last.
The systems the work touches, and her most recent dated update, so the record points back at the actual work.
Three durable layers
Mandates own. Playbooks instruct. Memory remembers.
Three separate mechanisms that work on each other. A mandate reaches for a playbook when the work it owns has a known method, and both draw on memory for the facts around it. Keeping them distinct is what lets you change the method without touching who is responsible for the outcome.
LayerQuestion it answersWhat it holds
MandateWhat ongoing work do you own?
Scope, outcome, authority, accountability, results, cadence, risk, and status.
PlaybookHow should this repeatable work be done?
Reusable instructions, sources, steps, naming rules, checks, filing, and delivery conventions.
MemoryWhat facts and context should carry forward?
People, preferences, decisions, history, and other durable context learned through the work.
Operating lifecycle
Assign it, then keep steering it.
Assign
Fill in the scope, the objective, the authority rung, the RACI, the measures, the systems and the cadence. Then hand it over.
Operate
She works it day to day between check-ins, reaching for a playbook wherever the method is already written down.
Report
Results, risks and the latest update arrive on the cadence you set, in the channel you set, instead of sitting in an activity log nobody opens.
Adapt or close
You widen her authority, revise the objective, pause the work or mark it done. Every change stays on the record.
The teammate substrate
Give the work an owner who stays with it.
You get back the hours you were spending keeping the work moving, and you keep the part that mattered: a named owner, an authority level you set, and results you can read at the next check-in. The work goes on between them.
What a Busy teammate is