Roughly 500 Words On…Why Job Descriptions are Vital, but also Kind of Pointless

This is the fifth post in a series that will explore a fundamental question: how can a leader be more intentional about connecting company strategy to individual work, individuals to teams, and teams to one another?  If you missed the first four posts on Roughly 500 Words On… you can read them here: https://kaleidoscopeadvisory.com/roughly500words/

Chapter 4: Designing (but not Over-Designing) Roles – Job Descriptions are Vital, but also Kind of Pointless

Job descriptions. Role profiles. Specs. 

Call them what you want, but these documents are a cornerstone of the talent strategy for most organizations. They help leaders define roles, articulate required qualifications, and determine how to target and hire exceptional talent. Individuals use these same documents to understand their roles, responsibilities, and general performance expectations. 

And yet, if you are reading this, you may have never seen your actual job description. Even if you have, it is unlikely your day-to-day activities look remotely like what was initially written.

So, what’s the point? If created and used in their most basic form, their only real purpose is to provide enough information to attract a candidate and create a basic set of standards for individuals—minimal value.

But if their potential is realized, the oft-overlooked job description becomes the critical link between strategy, organization, and individual, and a tool to help leaders more intentionally and thoughtfully design roles, teams, and organizations. 

To start: let’s go beyond just thinking about them as job descriptions. You must create a document that articulates the job scope, required qualifications, expected outputs, and critical success factors for individuals in the role. That last part is most important: what factors will make someone successful in the role? It isn’t just what they can bring to the role but also how the organization will help them succeed. This includes the reporting relationship, nature of the team, resources available, decision rights, and its integration into the rest of the organization. This level of detail pushes leaders to look beyond the single role and more broadly at how the role fits into the organizational system.

What else must leaders do to create high-impact role designs?

1. Define the Organizational Outputs and Individual Inputs – Clearly define how the role contributes to the core outputs of the organization. This is the exact point where strategy meets action, so capture it!
2. Articulate the Success Factors – A college degree, five years of experience, and proficiency with Microsoft Office – these are basic qualifications. The success factors are those unique experiences and capabilities of the individual, along with the resources and design of the organization come together to achieve something great.  Clearly articulate the non-negotiable success factors – both individual and organizational – and make sure they are put into place.
3. Acknowledge and Even Highlight the Challenges and Unknowns – Exceptional talent wants to solve problems and make a difference. Leaders should also acknowledge that the most important roles have risks and unknowns and need to be thoughtfully considered and designed for individuals to succeed.
4. Keep it Simple – It is difficult to predict how an organization or the asks of its people will evolve. It is even more challenging to predict how an exceptional talent will make the position more vital and impactful than designed. So don’t try. Keep it simple. Focus on the fundamental skills required and the success factors necessary and trust the foundation you created.

If done well, these documents won’t just end up filed in a dusty folder after a hire is made. They will become the lodestar, by which individuals, teams, and leaders understand their purpose, expectations, performance, and opportunity.  

Over the course of the first four posts, we connected the dots between strategy, organizational capabilities, operating model and organizational design, and role design. In the penultimate post of this series, we will turn our attention towards making tough decisions as changes to any one of those mentioned above are made. We will then look at many other critical factors beyond organization and talent necessary to bring exceptional organizations to life.

Until then, please let me know your thoughts on this series or if you want me to go into further detail on this topic or others. 

-Paul