Are Your People a Drag or a Sail?

We staff a lot of new initiatives. And we’re often brought in when executives want to rethink how they have staffed a position.

So I regularly hear how executives talk about the intersection of strategy and people. And some executives describe their current staff like a tractor pull–a powerful engine (strategy) is dragging a heavy sled behind it (the current staff).

Organizations often say “people are our most important asset” but people are also the source of most of your problems.  People often disappoint you. Top performers quit. Average performers often fail to deliver. Bottom performers threaten to sue. Departments go to war with each other. You spend less time than you want leading new initiatives and more time than you want refereeing internal squabbles. And when I see that, I usually see an understaffed, underfunded, underwhelming HR department awaiting further instructions from the executive team.

It does not have to be that way. In great organizations the culture fuels the strategy. The HR strategy supports the business strategy. Your systems, processes, expectations and rituals give lift and propulsion to your strategy, like a sail pulling you forward.

People are not your most important asset. People come and go. How you harness human achievement is your most important asset, and your only enduring source of competitive advantage.

The systems and processes of dealing with people are where the magic happens.

• How you attract great people, and how you recognize and deploy the internal talent you already have
• How you align the people to the mission.
• How you consistently inspire top performance from your people.
• How you retain the most valuable and drive away the least valuable.
• How you gracefully exit the people who no longer drive results.
• And how you do all this at a price you can afford.

Competent HR keeps you in compliance with the law. Great HR practices transform people from a drag into propulsion.

What High Performing Organizations Do Differently

Imagine a problem has just occurred that will cause your company to lose $15,000 per month in revenue, and might soon cause a string of similar problems. Which solution to the problem would you choose?

Solution A) This solution has no upfront costs, but it diverts your internal resources away from their current work, takes 4 months to implement (costing $60,000 in revenue) and is projected to lose an additional $24,000 during year one, with the likelihood of continuing losses of $36,000 per year thereafter. This solution has a 50% chance of failing completely and if it does fail, it might trigger a cascade of similar problems.

Solution B) This solution has an upfront cost of $15,000 (which was not in your budget). It requires no diversion of internal resources, and takes 2 months to implement (2 months faster than Solution A). By the end of year one, Solution B will recoup the $30,000 revenue lost during its two month implementation, and is likely to generate an additional $36,000 in annual revenue thereafter. Solution B has a performance guarantee, and significantly reduces your risk of this problem cascading into other areas.

If Solution B seems like the obvious choice, let’s review what happened the last time a vital person with hard-to-find skills resigned from your firm.  Did you consider using a search firm to fill the job?  If so, did the conversation sound like this? “I hoped our HR department might be able to find someone to fill this job. We thought if we could handle the search internally, we might save money on search fees. And if HR failed, we could always hire a search firm later.” Or, perhaps your internal deliberations sounded like this? “We did not budget for any search fees, so we had to do it on our own.” Both conversations probably sound familiar, and on the surface they might even sound reasonable. But when you look carefully, you realize that that both conversations make the same four assumptions. They assume:

1. There is no cost to leaving a position vacant. There is zero cost to the lost productivity of both the employee and the team.
2. There is no risk to leaving a position vacant. Under-staffing and over-working the current team will not result in any turnover risk. Zero.
3. Any hiring process that results in a hire is just as good as any other. A hiring decision will be just as good whether you have only one candidate to consider, or a full slate of 6 qualified people.
4. Any person hired in this job will deliver equivalent results. There is no difference in productivity or performance between an “A player” and a “C player.” Zero difference.

So if all four assumptions are laughably wrong, how did you ignore them in your decision making? Research shows exactly why it happens. Recruiting costs are very easy to calculate, but it is far harder to calculate the cost of not hiring, and harder still to calculate the cost of hiring badly. When faced with that kind of complexity, busy executives look at what they do understand (recruiting costs), and ignore what they don’t understand (the cost of hiring slowly and badly). The snap decision becomes: “We can’t afford to pay a search fee.”

High performing organizations are different. Because they have specific performance targets to meet for every position, the cost of not hiring (or hiring badly) is far more obvious. So they have an easier time balancing their recruiting costs against the return on investment of making a good hire quickly.

This is exactly what our Solution A and Solution B example did for you above. With good information, the trade-offs were easy to make. It was the gathering of the information that was complex. (Which is precisely why so many people will skip the next section of this post and just read the conclusion).

The Key to Employee Retention is to Make Your People More Marketable

I’ve long said that the key to retaining great employees is to make them more marketable. Top performers always want jobs where they can make an impact, learn new skills, and raise their professional profile. What that opportunity is denied, they quit to go find it elsewhere. So if you want to keep great people, just accept the counter-intuitive wisdom of it, and keep making your people more marketable.

But Mike Figliuolo recently took that a step further. He argues that the best way for a manager to build a team full of top people is to not only make people more marketable, but to actively market them. He thinks your best recruitment strategy is to be a “net exporter of talent” and here is his logic:

Take a look at your team. Who are you clinging to when you should be letting them go? Who needs to move on so they can grow somewhere else? How are you helping them do that?

Export some talent. They’ll appreciate it and always be grateful. And once you start exporting, remember there are five people out there waiting to take the spot you just created. You then have a new crop of talent to grow and eventually export.

Don’t Believe Everything You Think

In turbulent times like these, it’s critical to hire people who have a growth mindset.   But growth is not always so easy.  Before we can learn something new, we must often “unlearn” what we think we know.   That makes unlearning a business imperative. 

To adapt to rapid change, we must learn how to view things from new perspectives, and find ways to regularly challenge our out-dated assumptions.  

“The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.” Alvin Toffler

In a brilliant paper on unlearning, professor William Starbuck notes that senior managers, technical experts and organizations are all very resistant to evidence that contradicts their beliefs. 

“Top managers’ perceptual errors and self-deceptions are especially potent because senior managers can block actions proposed by their subordinates. Yet, senior managers are also especially prone to perceive events erroneously and to overlook bad news. Although their high statuses often persuade them that they have more expertise than other people, their expertise tends to be out-of-date. They have strong vested interests, and they know they will catch the blame if current policies and actions prove wrong.”

Counteracting the accumulated weight of senior managers, experts and organizational inertia is no easy task, but because the essential requirement for unlearning is doubt, any stimulus that creates doubt can be helpful.  In your own thinking, you may find that adopting these 8 mental practices will be particularly helpful:

• “It isn’t good enough.”  Dissatisfaction is the most common reason to doubt current methods, but often it is the slowest to bring change.
• “It’s only an experiment.”   When people see themselves as experimenting, they find it easier to test their assumptions, and listen to feedback – they have less interest in trying to look successful, after all not all experiments are supposed to turn out perfectly.
• “Surprises should be question marks.”  Both disruptions and pleasant surprises can reveal weakness in current thinking and stimulate improvements … but only if you use the opportunity.
• “Assume all dissents and warnings have some validity.”  Organizational hierarchy sends good news up the chain of command, but often blocks bad news from rising.   The paper outlines 4 sensible ways to address warnings.
• “Collaborators who disagree are both right.”  Rather than declaring one viewpoint right, and the other wrong, reconciling apparent contradictions between conflicting viewpoints often reveals that they are not contradictions at all, leading to new insights.
• “What does a stranger think?”  New people view problems from a different perspective than insiders.  Don’t just assume they are naive.
• “Work backwards.”  Cause and affect may not be so simple.  If you think A affects B, train yourself to look for evidence where B provides feedback that affects A. 
• “The converse of every proposition is equally valid.”    If you want to break free of your assumptions, try reversing your arguments.  For example: Do superiors impose authority?  Or do subordinates grant it?

Admittedly, I am ”often wrong, but never in doubt.”   But that said, I can attest to the profound impact of incorporating just a few of these practices into how we run Staffing Advisors.  

Can you imagine what would happen if  your organization adopted all of them?

Taking Action vs. “Thinking”

Almost everyone I know is really, really busy.   It’s hard to find time to think, so  tasks that can be done without much thinking end up getting most of our attention. Things like hiring, that require deep thought,  just slow us down.  So we set them aside for later, saying “I need to think about that some more.” 

It all sounds so … thoughtful and responsible.   

Except, like Winnie the Pooh, “Did you ever stop to think, and forget to start again?”  

Hiring new people is risky and often a bit unfamiliar to managers.  It’s not “on fire” so in most organizations you can get away with delaying for a good long while.   You can’t really ignore it completely, so you tell yourself  “I’m thinking about the job description.”   or “I’m still thinking about who I want to interview from that stack of resumes.”  or “I’m deciding who to bring back for a final interview.” 

And three months later the job is still vacant.  

As it turns out, you were not “thinking” at all.  You were simply delaying  … and making the problem worse by not taking decisive action.

So when you catch yourself saying “I want to think about that” I suggest you do what we do at Staffing Advisors.   When something is important but unfamiliar, when we might find ourselves procrastinating, we just turn it over to our scheduling mavens – our Project Coordinators.  They grab our Outlook calendars and schedule time to deal with it.  When the Outlook event pops up, then we ”have time” to think about it.  We deal with it, and move on.   This keeps our projects running on schedule, and frees our attention from trying to remember all those things we “have to think about.”   We either handle an issue right now,  decide not to handle it at all, or schedule a specific time in the future to handle it. 

Because long ago, we realized that “thinking about it” is not really doing anything at all.

The One Question to Ask About Performance Problems

Imagine you are working under a tight deadline.  You have a thousand other things to do and are relying on your employee Frank  to give you a key piece of information.  Your deadline passes and Frank has not given you what you asked for  …  and this is not the first time he’s disappointed you.  

If I only allowed you to ask one question to get at the root cause of Frank’s performance problem, what would your question be? 

Where you look to find solutions to performance problems reveals quite a bit about you.  Once I know where you reflexively look, I can predict both your business results and your employee turnover with almost clairvoyant accuracy.

While assumptions can simplify decision making, many assumptions about employee performance are really quite toxic to your workplace.   As Albert Einstein once said: “Things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”   And I find that far too many common managerial assumptions are dead wrong.

For example: some managers reflexively assume that performance problems are caused by an employee character flaw.   They reflexively think that the offending person’s work ethic must be the root cause of the problem.   You can hear their assumptions yelled across the room.  “That lazy SOB Frank is trying to sabotage me.  He KNEW I needed the sales figures by Friday.  He sent them late on purpose!”  Their questions revolve around Frank’s motivations.  “Why is he so lazy? Is he trying to make me look bad?”     

More highly evolved managers ”never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by misunderstanding.”  So their assumptions and questions are different.  They assume he was doing the best he could under the circumstances, so he must have lacked the training or ability to do his job.  They ask “Did he not understand what I expected?  Was he not smart enough or not trained how to do his job?  Is he even in the right job in the first place?”

But these kindhearted souls also miss the mark.   Because they are still looking at Frank for the solution to the problem.

The most effective managers look beyond Frank and instead look at the work environment.   In Switch, Chip and Dan Heath observed that ”What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem … we have a systematic tendency to ignore the situations and forces that shape other people’s behavior … the error lies in our inclination to attribute people’s behavior to the way they are rather than to the situation they are in.” 

Two years ago I wrote a post called “Why Won’t Your People Step Up” centered on my favorite quote from W. Edwards Deming:  ”A bad system will beat a good person every time.”

So when you have a performance problem, you need to ask the right question, the question that puts you at the very center of solving the problem once and for all:

“How have I created the environment to allow this failure to repeatedly occur?” 

How Important is Happiness at Work?

Jessica Pryce-Jones, author of Happiness at Work and CEO of iOpener, is cited in a recent article about workplace happiness on Forbes.com. Pryce-Jones reports her research findings that “the happiest employees are 180% more energized than their less content colleagues, 155% happier with their jobs, 150% happier with life, 108% more engaged and 50% more motivated. Most staggeringly, they are 50% more productive too.”

She writes that “happiness at work is closely correlated with greater performance and productivity as well as greater energy, better reviews, faster promotion, higher income, better health and increased happiness with life. So it’s good for organizations and individuals, too.”

So managers should get to work making employees happier, right? 

Not so fast.  Wally Bock, in his Three Star Leadership blog, notes that “the key word in the above is “correlated.” You will recall from your education that correlation does not mean causation.”

Bock’s bottom line to bosses: your job isn’t to make people happy so they’ll be productive. It’s not to make them productive but not worry about their well-being, either. Your job is to do the things that create a human-friendly working environment where the team and team members are productive and morale is high.

Some scientists think that people have a “set point” for happiness that will not vary much depending on external circumstances.   If that’s true, and if having happy employees is important to you, perhaps you should consider hiring people who happy to begin with.

I’m a happy person, an I like being surrounded by happy people.  But frankly I think all this happy talk is a distraction from simply managing performance.   I’ll continue to focus on helping our clients hire people who are interested in, and capbable of driving the business results they need.  Then at least I know our placements will be successful and, hopefully,  our clients will be happy with us.

How the CEO Should Manage Managers

An article in Inc.com, by Darren Dahl recommends that CEOs pay more attention to managing their management team.  The key is to set clear performance expectations, and then hold the person accountable. 

It sounds simple right? 

But what’s the best way to do that with managers? Here are some strategies to consider:

Set the Vision — Make sure your managers know what they’re managing toward.  Consider sharing clear short-term (one year) and long-term (three to five year) business plans.

Document the Details and Communicate — Make sure your managers have all the tools necessary to do their jobs well. Consider developing some kind of structured feedback regarding performance. You cannot over-communicate the vision, goals, and strategies for your business.

Measure Tasks — A key part of knowing how well a manager is doing is to establish straightforward quantitative measures based on the performance of their team, says Jenni Luke, national executive director of the Step Up Women’s Network, a national organization for women. Luke suggests looking at objective goals set in your business plan, such as:

• Is your manager achieving revenue targets?
• Are they operating on budget?
• Have they developed new customers?

But performance targets are not enough.

Dr. Alice Waagen, founder and president of Workforce Learning, a leadership development company in Washington, DC, says you can establish clear performance guidelines about what makes a good manager, such as:

1. A good manager creates short- and long-term goals for all staff.
2. A good manager sets realistic standards and targets to measure progress to plan.
3. A good manager provides specific, objective feedback on an ongoing basis, informing, enlightening and helping staff members improve their performance.

“For managers to succeed, they need time to learn to manage” Waagen says.  “And then, once they do, they need to be held accountable for their results.”

In my work, I often see managers held accountable for business outcomes, but rarely do I see them evaluated on the management fundamentals that lead to peak team performance.  Dr. Waagen is definitely on to something there.

The Zone of Incompetence

Around every top performer, you need to watch out for a “zone of incompetence” – an area where other people can relax just a bit, think a little less hard, or focus on other issues – trusting that the top performer will anticipate and correct any problems that come up.  The high achiever will always make sure the results turn out just fine. 

Of course, this is not always the case – some top performers encourage everyone around them to raise their standards, but I find this is less common in practice – it usually takes two or three top performers to ”raise the bar” for an entire work team.   Hey, it’s human nature – we all have too much to do.  If you work with a superstar, it’s just too easy to trust the top performer and go focus your attention on other problems.

When you manage a top performer, often you simply don’t realize just how much they did, or how many problems they overcame … until they are gone.  You can never be entirely sure if they were ”carrying” some other people on their coattails, or were just so talented that other people felt like they were “held back” and would cheerfully step up if given the opportunity.   When a top performer leaves, sometimes it creates room for other people to shine, but other times, the whole team collapses.

So when you are planning to promote a top person, or thinking about succession planning – pay keen attention to the “zone” around them.  Their supervisors, peers and subordinates just might be a bit too relaxed and trusting that things will “all work out.”    You would be wise to strengthen the zone all around a top person before you consider replacing them, because there is no tougher job than coming in to fill the shoes of a superstar … and no bigger hiring risk for you.

Managers with Really “High Standards”

“I need to warn you, Mary has really high standards.”    You hear this kind of comment all the time in the workplace.   But what does it mean, really?   Is Mary some impossible-to-please overly demanding ogre?  A detail-obsessed punctillious, nitpicking micromanager?  Often the person issuing the “warning” secretly thinks so – Mary’s behavior is a mystery to them.

More often, in my experience, those “unrealistically high standards” are completely warranted – and absolutely necessary in order to achieve some kind of business imperative. 

Here’s a fact that may surprise you: 

Top performers are powerfully attracted to managers who know what they want to achieve – managers who hold people accountable to high performance standards. 

Demanding managers make you bring your “A” game to work every day.  They don’t tolerate “dead wood” – so they often have great people on their teams.  They quickly recognize good work.  And they often get things done in record time.  Top performers are very comfortable with clear expectations, and like accountability – they want to keep score.  They also recognize the fact that  that working for demanding managers is great for their career.

Often the manager with high standards is someone who sets very high expectations for their own personal performance, and is unwilling to accept mediocre performance from people around them.  Maybe the manager with “high standards” simply outworked everyone around them in order to achieve their  professional success, and made quite a few personal sacrifices along the way.   They cannot imagine working any other way, and simply cannot work well with people who have different values.

Maybe the manager with “high standards” knows exactly what is at stake, and what the true cost of errors or failure on the project would be – they are willing to be really demanding in order to achieve a worthy goal.  (When you are an engineer working on the moon launch, you want to be sure you did your math correctly).

In my experience,  the manager with high standards is rarely an unrealistic, self centered, egotistical jerk.  Far more often the person judging them is simply unaware why such high standards are so important.

Thank You for Quitting

Surveys indicate that 2010 is going to be a year filled with employee turnover.  And that is a great gift to every manager who is still not managing performance tightly.  Every time an average employee resigns, you have a chance to rethink who should be in the job, to upgrade the caliber of your team, to completely reset expectations.  You have a chance to make a fresh start, and take a big step forward toward your goals.  

And you would be wise to take advantage of that opportunity.  The national economic indicators show a long slow recovery from this devastating recession – we still have quite a bit of turbulence ahead of us. There will be no rising tide to lift all boats, instead we will all be lifting our own boats. 

So read this before you start hiring, and read this before you orient your new team members, and … remember to be grateful for the opportunity turnover has given you. 

Actually, while you are at it, is there anyone on your team you would not fight to retain if they were considering resigning?  Because anyone you would not fight to keep is probably someone you should think about replacing, or at least managing more tightly.

Why You Need to Keep Score

As human beings, we don’t like looking at our failures.  So we tend not to keep score, or create hard metrics for our own performance.  We’d rather not think about our mistakes and prefer to focus our attention on more pleasant things.  

And while not keeping score may be pleasant, it’s also very expensive.  Because hidden in your failures are some positively huge expenses, and some really valuable lessons about how to prevent similar mistakes in the future.

I recently helped a client analyze the cost of their hiring mistakes, and also the cost of their hiring delays.  It took a few weeks to go back and gather some data about hires, terminations, and lag times between various stages of the hiring process.  And it took a day or so to pull it all together and get it into a spreadsheet.  

We found hundreds of thousands of dollars in (preventable) lost profit.   We found more money than the entire annual budget for the HR department.   Much of the lost profit was in places that were not even considered a “problem area” before we rigorously looked at the numbers.   This is in no way unusual, in fact, I have yet to do one of these projects for a professional services organization where we did not find hundreds of thousands of dollars of lost profit.    Now my client knows exactly where to focus their attention to recover all that lost profit – and that’s great news.

Numbers matter.  So as a big fan of rigorous metrics, you’d think I’d be happy to look at my own data.    I’m not,  I prefer to avoid it.  So knowing that, I set up a process where I have to look at it.   Ellen, our Operations Manager, gathers and publishes our statistics regularly.  Everyone in the company can see the data, and when I look at it  I always find a surprise, some area where I can do better.   I always learn something that I would never have learned otherwise.  For me, failure is a great teacher.

So today, Ellen and I reviewed the retention statistics on our placements.  I must tell you, this is much less fun for me than it was before the recession because we count layoffs against our statistics.  (I think performance problems are often buried inside of layoffs, so we count them ‘against’ our numbers).

And although the search industry prefers to look at retention rates for 18 months, we look at them for 3 years - anything less just lets us off the hook too easily.   Our promise is to help our clients hire people who get results, and it’s devilishly hard to measure real results and long term contribution during an executive’s first eighteen months on the job.   So if we only counted retention rates at 6 months or a year, we would not learn much about how our placements actually contributed to our clients getting results.  

So here are the retention stats on our placements:

• 91% are still on the job at 12 months.
• 90% are still on the job at 18 months.
• 85% are still on the job at 3 years.

I must tell you, these numbers were much better last year, so this was painful to look at, but you know what?  I learned something by forcing myself to look at them.   By sharing them with you, I am challenging myself to further improve next year …. and that’s the real reason you can’t afford not to keep score – it’s fuel for improvement.

Your Best People Are Getting Calls

I just spoke with someone we placed last year.  The good news is that she is happy and thriving, likes the direction of her organization and sees a bright future for herself.  (Yeaa hiring process). 

But she also mentioned something you might consider bad news, or even find disturbing.  She said “I don’t know why, but I’m getting all these calls lately for people wanting me to interview for other jobs.” 

I don’t find this remotely disturbing.  And it does not surprise me one bit.  I already know your best people are getting calls from recruiters all the time. 

Your best people are routinely being enticed by your competition  – that’s just the reality of the workplace now.  And the trend is accelerating.  Top performers are always in demand, but sites like LinkedIn have now made it far easier for recruiters to find everyone.  Information just flows more freely now than it did 10 years ago.  

Ignore this shift at your peril.

Your top performers are weary, overworked and may be thinking it’s time for a change.   Some surveys say Gen X is most likely to leave first, many others say high performers are most vulnerable to leaving.  Either way, Fred Crandall, a senior consultant for Watson Wyatt says “There’s going to be a lot of churn” (turnover) as the economy improves.  I would have to agree, more turnover is coming.

So what are you doing to retain your key players?  How are you making them feel valuable?  What kind of performance feedback are you giving?  Studies show that most people want more feedback and many people feel ignored by their manager. 

If you accept this new reality that your best people are constantly being recruited, then you might want to check out what Les McKeown has to say.  He lists 7 Reasons Your Top Performers Are Likely to Leave in 2010, and 3 Things You Must Do Now to Retain Them.

Great Recruiting is Useless …

Many people think the reason to engage a search firm is to get help with recruiting.  Well, maybe that approach works in big companies, but in small firms great recruiting is nearly useless by itself. 

Hiring smart internal recruiters, engaging search firms, and even turning the recruiting process over to a Recruitment Process Outsourcing firm is usually a really bad idea for small organizations.  Recruiting support is absolutely useless to you …  if it is not integrated within a cohesive hiring and performance management process.  (NOTE: By cohesive, I do not mean expensive).

Do you ever wonder why so many companies are frustrated and disappointed by contingency search firms?  It’s because most contingency search firms do not see it as their “place” to suggest how organizations should run their internal hiring process.  So contingent search firms focus their efforts on recruiting.  But great hiring involves a lot more than recruiting.  And you can’t improve the whole until all the parts work together:

• Simply writing up a typical job description is useless … unless you first understand what performance is expected from the new hire and what competencies are necessary to drive that performance.
• Developing an interesting and complete job description and ideal candidate profile is useless … unless you reconcile your target hiring profile with market realities.  (You might find you have champagne tastes on a beer budget and may need to revise your performance expectations to fit the budget).
• Simply posting a job description on job boards is useless … unless you employ additional strategies to recruit less active job seekers.  You can’t make an intelligent hiring decision selecting from only those people who happened to see your ad.  Conversely, you should not avoid ads, they can be a good way to diversify and expand your candidate pool.  If you want great hires, it’s important not to limit your candidate pool to people found using any single recruiting method (including employee referrals).
• Simply recruiting more candidates (or paying an agency to recruit) is useless  … unless your hiring managers know how to interview and how to distinguish top performers from other candidates.  Research shows that most hiring managers do not use the best strategies to select top candidates.
• Simply doing a better job of selecting resumes and interviewing candidates is useless … unless you structure your interview sequence to provide a great experience for the candidates.   You can do more harm than good when your disorganized interview sequence reveals internal organizational conflict and indecision.
• Simply making the occasional good hire is nearly useless  … unless your managers have confidence that your hiring process can reliably produce great people “on demand.”   Until the hiring process is considered reliable, managers will always be reluctant to manage poor performers.  (When managers are confident they can “trade up” then performance management becomes much more effective.)
• Improving your hiring process is a fine start, but you will not be able to keep improving your process … until you follow-up on every hire to ensure that they achieved the business results you expected.   After all, getting business results is the whole point of hiring isn’t it? 

A great hiring process is a “force multiplier” for a great performance management process, and vice versa – both processes support and multiply the effectiveness of the other.  

But recruiting?  Don’t even think about spending money on recruiting until the rest of your hiring process warrants the investment – you will just be pouring fine champagne in a dirty, leaky, plastic cup.

Job Descriptions No Longer Describe Jobs

The most accurate part of many job descriptions is “other duties as assigned.”  The rest of it is just a dull list of responsibilities and qualifications lacking all context.  I read them all the time and can rarely understand what the job is really all about.

Any perceived relevance of the job description rarely survives contact with actual work – they are outdated the moment they are written. Rarely do they define the work to be accomplished, and they almost never define the goals to be achieved.  They are, quite simply, a relic of the industrial age.  In the Brand for Talent blog, Libby Sartain asks what’s next if the job description is no longer relevant?  She says:

“The changes of the past decade point to a different environment in which business must search for people. Instead of measuring talent needs by the number of jobs, the forward-thinking business thinks in terms of work—the incremental activities that it must successfully complete for the business to meet its obligations. The measurement of effort as work instead of jobs enables business to focus on output rather than on the input of people in specific roles.”

Hmmmm, measuring the outputs (results), instead of the inputs (activity) – that sounds like a Results-Only-Work Environment (ROWE) to me.  Are we finally moving from industrial age, activity-based time and motion studies and into the future of work –  managing for results?  I sure hope so.

We take this results-based approach in our consulting work with small to midsize enterprises.  At the start of each search engagement we ask the hiring manager what success looks like a year from today.  What will need to be accomplished in the next 12 months for the new hire to be considered a success?  What talents and abilities must someone have to drive those results?  What values fit well within the company culture?   We write it all up in a document we call a Hiring Blueprint.  But really, we could call it a “Results Description” – it’s what a job description could be (if it actually wanted to be relevant).  So how do we know our documents are actually relevant?  Because people refer to them frequently in performance management conversations.

In fact, one of the great joys in our consulting work is following up on the placements we’ve made.  During the first year, we check in with the hiring manager about every 3 months, asking not just ”How is Frank working out?” but ”What have you achieved together?”   We call and ask the candidate not just “How do you like the job?” but ”How does the job differ from your expectations going in to it?”   We judge our own performance by the accuracy of the performance expectations we set and the corresponding results that were achieved. 

Yes, we have an enviable track record of success on our placements, but this is not a “set it and forget it” approach – Results Descriptions change year to year.   Jobs change, unforeseen challenges emerge.  Growing businesses outgrow people, technology and market forces change the nature of the work, and eventually people outgrow jobs.  Work is not static, and job descriptions should not be static either.

If you agree with the following statements, it’s no wonder that very few firms hire effectively:

• The typical job description is useless in defining performance expectations.
• The typical resume is useless in predicting the job performance of the candidate.  

If the Job Description is no longer viable, let’s at least consider replacing it with the Results Description.  As to the resume, I have no idea what to replace it with… 

 (By the way, if you want to see a sample of our Results Descriptions, just take a look at our current searches).