🖤 Open Works #42 How Do I Set Effective Boundaries For My People Team

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💭 This Week’s People Problem

🖤 Our Take On How You Solve

If your People team is overwhelmed, reactive, saying yes to too many things…or quietly doing 79% of the organisation’s invisible work… you likely don’t have a resourcing problem. You have a boundaries problem.

Here’s how to fix that.

1. Clarify the scope of your role

You can’t expect your team to hold boundaries if you don’t have them yourself. That clarity needs to exist between you and the founder/CEO before it can exist anywhere else.

Use your next check-in with them to:

• Align on your top accountabilities

• Sense-check your current priorities vs theirs

• Gut-check your focus pie

Write it down. Even if it’s rough. If you’re not clear on where your energy should go, neither is your team.

2. Build shared clarity with your team

This is the game-changer. You need to show your team what they’re allowed to protect.

Here’s a good rhythm:

• Async: Share your priorities and draft pie chart. Ask each person to self-assess their current week.

• 1:1s: Spot the leaks. What are they saying yes to that they shouldn’t be? What requests are draining time but adding no real value?

• Team meeting: Build a simple alignment doc together:

  • Here’s what we own

  • Here’s our primary and secondary focus

  • Here’s what we are not doing

  • Here’s how we want to work

This creates permission to say no.

3. Make it visible across the org

Now the hard part. You’ve got internal clarity. Time to externalise it.

Create a one-pager or team profile:

• What your team does

• Where your energy is focused

• How other teams can get support (and what they shouldn’t expect)

• Your key metrics and roadmap

Drop it in your Notion, link it in Slack, point people to it when they bypass process or start fire-hosing your team and use available comms opportunities to share your people and culture roadmap, what you’re working on, what you’re not and why.

This isn’t being difficult. This is being transparent.

4. Check in regularly

Don’t set and forget.

• Use 1:1s to ask: “Are you able to focus on what we said matters?”

• Look back at real calendars. What actually happened?

• Step in when a pattern starts forming (same team, same chaos, every sprint)

📌 Use the data to address issues with repeat offender stakeholders. 

GandalfAI Resource Recommendations

We asked GandalfAI (available to content pass holders) for the best resources on this subject from the Open Org codex.

• Posthog’s People Team Profile and Goals

• Maker vs Manager Schedule

• Team Charter Template

Want To Go Deeper? Check Out Our Boundaries Playbook Included In The Content Pass

This approach comes straight from our Setting Effective Boundaries playbook available with our Content Pass.

Grab The Content Pass and get access to ALL of our tried and tested people and culture playbooks, £30k+ in HR Tech & partner discounts as well as unlimited access to Gandalf–Open Org’s AI search and coaching agent trained on our whole knowledge codex.

You’ll get:

• Templates for your own scope doc and team profile

• Workshop guide to run your alignment session

• Miro boards, facilitation tips and example outputs

🎁 Use code OWORKSFRIENDS10 for 10% off year one.

🤓 Psst! Want to Get Your Current “People Problem” Featured?

We’re here for the trickiest challenges you’ve got. Hit reply to this email, and let us know what’s keeping you up at night, and we’ll feature next time anonymously!

With 🧊 & 🔥 

Adam & John

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