It seems like there are positions in every organization that just struggle no matter who is filling them.  Why is that?

Our typical response to underperformers is more training, more coaching, more incentives, and more pressure.  At some point, we throw our hands up and say, “I guess they’re not the right person,” and we let them go.

But what if it’s not about the person?  What if they were set up for failure before they even began?

Management theorist, Edwards Deming, famously stated that 94% of the problems in an organization are due to the system, while only 6% fall to the workers.

In other words, if an employee is underperforming, worry less about fixing the employee and worry more about fixing the system in which they’re operating.

As managers, it’s our responsibility to create an environment for success and set our employees up to win.  If they’ve failed, it means we’ve failed.

Every poor employee experience has something to teach us about leadership.

One of those lessons is about job design.  Before someone ever gets hired, what are we asking them to do?

 

Job Design

Jobs used to be designed with one focus: maximize efficiency and productivity.  During the Industrial Revolution, people were just another cog in the corporate machinery, with every minute and every movement carefully planned out.

And you know what?  It worked.  Factories became exponentially more productive.  The downside is that people hated going to work every day.

Thus, the working-for-the-weekend culture of the modern world was born.

Eventually, we learned that people like to be treated as human beings and that by designing jobs with people’s motivations and interests in mind, it’s possible for people to both like their work and perform at a high level.

People and Performance – these are the two focuses to keep in mind as you read. We’re not just thinking about which tasks and responsibilities need to be accomplished for the organization to succeed, we’re maximizing the experience of the person in the role as well.

 

Who needs to think about job design?

Everyone, to some extent.

Whether you’re in HR, management, or a frontline employee, there are all sorts of scenarios in which you may need to be thinking about how to design jobs.

• You’re in a startup that’s growing rapidly, and the simple structure where everyone’s a technician and reports directly to the founder is no longer working.
• You’ve been hired into a new position with only vague guidelines of what you’ll be doing, and it’s up to you to write your own job description.
• A competitor catches you on your heels and introduces a paradigm-shifting innovation, and you need to rapidly rethink what you do and how you do it.
• An unforeseen crisis hits (ahem, Covid) and you can no longer do the job you were hired for, not in the same way.
• Your business goals have changed, or you need to turn things around, and you realize that what has brought you to where you are is not what’s going to get you to where you want to go.

Regardless of where you are in the organization, analyzing your role and the roles on your team can help you understand why some things aren’t working and what you can improve.

This isn’t about creating a multi-page document that will be tucked away in some file folder for years, never to be looked at again (when’s the last time you dug out your job description?).

This is about bringing clarity and focus to you and your team so that you learn how to coordinate your efforts while each doing your best work.

 

8 tensions of Job Design

Consultants and authors, Bolman and Deal, identify eight tensions to manage when thinking about job design.  Keep your own role, as well as the roles of your team members, in mind as you read.

 

1. Differentiation vs. Integration

This is just a fancy way of saying that you need to figure out a way to divide up all the work that needs to be done, while also being able to tie it all back together again to ensure that people are coordinating with each other.

Job design is never just about one individual.  You can’t create your job description in a vacuum.  By defining what you are responsible for, you are also defining what you are not responsible for, which means that the roles around you change when yours changes.

Job design is really a bigger, structural issue – how do all the pieces fit together to achieve the vision?

Step one:  Make a list of all the responsibilities that need to be covered in order for your team or organization to succeed.  If this is a redesign, don’t assume you know what everyone is doing and how much effort is required for each aspect of their job.  Ask them.  Better yet, track it.  Take a week or two (my team took four) and meticulously record on your calendar everything you do each day.  At the end of the designated time, categorize what you’ve done and add up how many hours each week or month each item takes.

Step two:  With your realistic list of work responsibilities in front of you, work with your team to imagine some different methods of dividing it all up.  The two most common categories of division are product-based vs. function-based.  Simply put, you can create divisions or departments around each major product line or market demographic (think of GM and their divisions – Chevrolet, GMC, Buick, Cadillac, etc.) or you can create divisions around the major functions of your business (e.g. sales, finance, operations, HR, etc.).  Or get creative and imagine a hybrid of these or even something like a matrix structure.

Another consideration is whether these divisions will be made up of clear individual roles or if you’d like to move to a more team-based structure, where leadership, decision-making, and workload are shared.

This may seem like a lot of work (it is), but you have to put in the effort and look at the bigger structural picture if you want to design jobs well.  According to Bolman and Deal, 50% of restructuring efforts fail miserably – don’t let this be you.

Bonus step:  Repeat steps one and two for where you want your organization to be 5 or 10 years from now.  If you accomplish your vision, what will your future org chart need to look like in order to maintain that success and momentum?

If your vision became reality tomorrow, what structure would you need to sustain that reality? Share on X

 

2. Gap vs. Overlap

Sometimes gaps are created because someone didn’t do the work of mapping out and assigning all the responsibilities ahead of time, and sometimes they develop slowly over time as people begin to define their jobs more narrowly.  Les McKeown provides an example of a typical gap that occurs in business:

A salesperson closes a deal with a client, hands off the paperwork to operations to fulfill the order, yet an important detail is missing and the client needs to be contacted.  Who will do this?  Operations doesn’t feel like this is their job, and the salesperson is already on to the next client and doesn’t want to be bogged down with details and paperwork.  So, the ball gets dropped, the order goes unfulfilled, and the client gets disappointed.  Gaps like this develop all the time in organizations. 

If you want to evaluate this for yourself, just look at where the balls are getting dropped most often in your setting.

On the other hand, without clear roles, you can also inadvertently create a lot of overlap between people.  You may have redundancies where multiple people are doing the same type of work when it would be more efficient to have just one person doing it.  You may have so much overlap that no one can make a decision on their own, and they constantly need to be running it by a dozen other people first.  To use the scenario above, if you have an overlap problem, both operations and the salesperson will contact the client and ask them the same questions, making your organization look exceptionally unorganized.  In this case, you don’t know where your job ends and someone else’s begins.

 

3. Underuse vs. overload

Self-explanatory, right?  Some jobs are designed with too few responsibilities, while others are designed with way too many.  On the underuse side, it could be that a new position isn’t quite full-time-worthy, but you advertised it that way just to attract a different pool of applicants.  This isn’t terrible – it allows a new person to learn the ropes before being tossed in the deep end. 

However, be mindful of Parkinson’s Law here, which states that work expands to fill the time and resources allotted for it.  In other words, if you’ve assigned 10 responsibilities, it’ll take them 40 hours.  If you assign 6, it’ll still take them 40 hours.  Underuse can lead to thumb-twiddling and pet projects if not monitored well.

On the overload side, it could be that you only have the budget for one new hire, but you really have an entire department’s worth of work, so you dump the whole thing on the first person to say “yes.” This seems to be the more common route of the two, possibly because it feels like we’re getting more bang for our buck when in reality, quality will likely suffer and the employee could very well burn out.

 

4. Lack of clarity vs. lack of creativity

Common in a startup, job descriptions are vague and mostly non-existent.  Essentially, everyone is everything – sales, operations, marketing, business development, etc.  This lack of clarity is actually ok in those early stages, but as sales increase and the business grows, you will very quickly and very predictably run into problems if you don’t bring some shape to your organizational chart.  As complexity increases, your attention to structure and systems needs to increase as well.

It is possible to go too far in our quest for clarity, though.  Typical of organizations that are further along in their life cycles, the work can become overly structured, and peoples’ jobs can become too tightly defined.  If every minute is predetermined, there is no room for innovation or change.  Additionally, silos can develop as everybody starts to focus on their own world. 

To avoid this isolation and status-quo mentality, you need to build in a buffer that allows for variety and creates room for new projects.  A good example of this is Google’s practice of allowing employees to use 20% of their time to work on any project that interests them and that they think will benefit the company (whether this is actually still practiced at Google has been questioned, but it’s a good principle nonetheless).

 

5. Excessive autonomy vs. excessive interdependence

Autonomy is important.  According to Dan Pink, it’s one of the three core motivations that drive us.  However, take it too far and things get out of alignment pretty quickly.  Everybody has their own way of doing things, their own systems, and their own priorities.  Back when the organization was starting, and everybody’s job description included everything, this wasn’t as big a deal because fewer people were depending on each other to complete a job (i.e. the baton didn’t need to be passed off as often – one person could run an entire business process from start to finish). 

As complexity grows, however, interdependence goes up and the need for coordinating mechanisms increases considerably.

Again, though, it’s a balance.  Too many coordinating mechanisms and you end up in a place where you need to have a meeting to solidify the agenda for the next meeting.  Decisions grind to a halt because they need to have the input and approval of 14 different managers before anything can happen.  If any of those people are on holidays, you’re out of luck. 

As McKeown writes, the goal is that you design your structure to be a decision-making machine.  Jobs should be designed in such a way that they are integrated well with the larger team, but they maintain enough autonomy to stay agile.  This will take a bit of experimentation with things like meeting rhythms and communication systems to get it right in your setting.

 

6. Too loose vs. too tight

This is all about how rigidly defined the work process is for a certain job.  Is every action predetermined, timed, and documented in some operations manual somewhere?  How much freedom and authority does an employee have to make changes and determine how their responsibilities will be carried out?  Getting this right will obviously be industry-specific, as some require incredible precision while others require greater individual creativity.

Generally speaking, motivation goes up when the people who are actually doing the work get to have a say in how they do the work.  We support the worlds that we help create. Frontline workers also have some of the best insight as to how to improve what they’re doing, so you’d do well to give them the resources and support they need to make the changes that they deem are necessary.

If the job is designed too tightly, we can treat workers like machines and miss out on valuable knowledge.  If we design jobs too loosely, the lack of accountability and oversight can lead to problems such as inconsistent customer experience or even unethical behaviour.

We support the worlds that we help create. Share on X

 

7. Goal-less vs. goal-bound

Many organizations have grand visions and lofty mission statements, while only a few know how to create traction and execute a strategy to realistically achieve that vision.  Setting goals and objectives are a key part of grounding your vision in reality and helping you know what you need to do today to move forward.  They are also a powerful source of motivation for your team. 

Popular systems in use today include OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), 4DX (4 Disciplines of Execution), as well as many others that would fall under the category of MBOs (Management by Objectives).  

There are at least two ways, though, that being too focused on goals can lead you astray.  One, you can get so locked on to your objectives that you lose your ability to be flexible and no longer respond to changes in your market or external environment (i.e. you’ve got a plan and you’re sticking with it no matter what).  It can create a lot of inertia that’s difficult to slow down.

Second, hitting a narrowly defined target can cause you to lose sight of the bigger picture and what you’re trying to accomplish.  Named “Goodhart’s Law,” this is the tendency to turn our measures into targets, which quickly skews our focus.  Think of teachers who “teach for the test,” or salespeople gaming the system to hit their quotas.  People will always find a way of getting the numbers to go up, and not all of those ways actually line up with the greater goals of the organization.

When it comes to designing jobs, think carefully about what the performance measures will be, and what success for that role will look like.  Give clear focus, but ground it in the bigger picture and in the values you want your team to model.

 

8. Irresponsible vs. unresponsive

How flexible does a person have to be in their job when it comes to interruptions and last-minute assignments?  Do they need to plan out their time in advance and stick to the schedule, or is it more important that they have the ability to change directions at a moment’s notice?  What level of responsiveness will be most useful to their teammates and beneficial for your customers?

This is a tension I constantly wrestle with.  During slower seasons, it’s easy for me to be responsive to others’ needs and requests, but when things get hectic, I can quickly go into lockdown mode and shut everyone out to get things done.  While some of this comes down to individual disposition and personality, it’s important to think about what would be best for the job or position you’re designing.

Requiring too high a degree of flexibility will cause some of their other core responsibilities to go unfulfilled, while a workload that is too rigid may produce a lone ranger who drops the ball on coordinating with others and responding to customer needs.  Turning the dials on a couple of the other tensions, such as overload vs. underuse or too tight vs. too loose, will affect this dynamic in a big way.

 

Where do you land?

If you run your current position through these 8 filters, where on the spectrum do you end up?  What needs tweaking and what seems to be just right?

If you’re in management, these 8 tensions provide a helpful framework for not only designing new jobs but evaluating the effectiveness of your current roles as well.

If you’re not in management, but feel that a few key changes to your job description would improve your effectiveness, try to schedule a meeting with your leader to discuss this.  Tell them your concerns and present some options for how you could increase your contribution to the company’s mission.  As long as you don’t come across as overly critical, any manager worth their salt will be thrilled to have an employee who shows such intentionality and ownership over their job.

There is so much more to say about job design, but I hope you’ve found this to be a helpful list of concepts for creating positions that people love to be in.

If you’re in a place where you need to design or redesign roles in your organization and would appreciate some outside help to get it right, feel free to reach out.  Perhaps you need to clarify your org chart as you prepare to scale your company, or you need to tweak existing roles to improve your culture and decrease turnover.  Either way, send me a message and we can have a conversation.

Thanks for being here,

Dan