Tag: talent strategy

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

This is the fourth 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 three posts on Roughly 500 Words On… you can read them here: https://kaleidoscopeadvisory.com/roughly500words/

Chapter 3: Differentiating Between an Operating Model and Organizational Design – We are all Cogs in the Machine, and it is Incredible!

A common and cynical refrain for many in the working world is that we are all just cogs in the machine. This refrain elicits a vision of a vast machine where workers slowly and agonizingly grind away and play a small and relatively inconsequential role in making some anonymous machine work. Nobody knows what that machine produces, but workers continually churn on mindlessly, lacking autonomy and fulfillment.

It’s an exceedingly bleak view of the world. But what if there is a far more compelling interpretation? 

What if each cog is so finely machined to make it unique and irreplaceable? And each cog is precisely placed alongside other cogs to make up a critical component of the vast machine? And that machine has been imagined, designed, engineered, and assembled to be able to do something extraordinary (like create perfect banana splits)? Each cog in that vast machine is incredible if that is the case. That machine and those cogs: that is what leaders can create.

In the last post, we talked about organizational and individual capabilities. At a macro level, these are the outputs – the key things an organization needs to do – and the inputs – the key things individuals do to enable the outputs. But now, we need to be more thoughtful about organizing those capabilities. 

Leaders and managers often jump straight to organizational design: who are my people, their reporting lines, and the management structure? While essential, it doesn’t consider the intersection between strategy, capabilities, and structure, and its orientation towards customers or external partners. That consideration, building the proverbial machine, is an organization’s operating model. 

Simply, an operating model is the broad organization of a company’s capabilities to enable a strategy. If we return to our orchestra analogy, the orchestra’s operating model informs the arrangement of each section of instruments before the conductor and audience. For an orchestra, its operating model balances each delicate sound and creates its macrostructure, within which each section and individual is organized. All of this is tuned and harmonized to ensure the sound is perfect for the audience. 

Returning to a company’s operating model, leaders must thoughtfully arrange an organization’s capabilities to optimize how it interacts externally with customers and partners, and internally across functions and teams. Leaders must also determine how to thoughtfully introduce processes, technology, and governance to make the whole system work. Once an operating model is in place, leaders can focus on organizational design, roles, and people to make the operating model come to life and ultimately enable the strategy. Only then should leaders focus their attention on roles, reporting lines, sizing, and span of control.  

So, where to start? Every leader should consider a few questions when thinking about her organization’s operating model:

1. External Orientation: How am I orienting my organization to my market, customers, or external partners? What are the critical connection or integration points?
2. Internal Interaction: Which distinct organizational capabilities do I need to come together to collaborate effectively, solve problems, and create solutions? 
3. Connective Tissue: What processes, technologies, or governance will I need to encourage and manage my external and internal interactions?  
4. Risk Management: Where are the most critical connections or the riskiest failure points in the system? How will I reinforce those through structure, process, or governance?

So far, we have connected the dots between strategy, organizational outputs, and company structure. The next post will focus on individual role design, the critical link between an organization’s outputs and the required individual effort and inputs.

Until then, please let me know your thoughts on this series or topics you would like me to cover in the future. 

-Paul

This is the second 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 two posts on Roughly 500 Words On… you can read them here: https://kaleidoscopeadvisory.com/roughly500words/

Chapter 2: Organizational Capabilities versus Individual Capabilities – Organizations Don’t Do Things; People Do things and that Matters

We talk about organizations as singular beings capable of developing X or manufacturing Z. But why? Microsoft makes software, except it doesn’t. Merck discovers cutting-edge therapies, except it doesn’t. Dunkin’ makes doughnuts, except, again, it doesn’t. People do those things. People write the code, discover and manufacture the pharmaceuticals, and make the doughnuts. And that is an important distinction.  

Now, this probably seems obvious and more about the arcane quirks of the English language than actionable management guidance. But the ability to understand the relationship between the individual and the organization and how to use structure, role scope, and individual skills to execute your company’s strategy is an essential management skill.

Fundamentally, we are talking about the relationship between organizational and individual capabilities. Most sophisticated leaders understand both and spend a significant amount of time thinking about the broad organizational capabilities required to have a successful organization – create, market, and sell products, and enable administratively – and the individual capabilities they must acquire or develop to do those activities. However, few leaders can deftly translate strategy into organizational and individual abilities or use individual and organizational capabilities to shape and influence strategy. The primary goal here is to become more comfortable with these concepts. 

How should leaders start to think about this? To oversimplify, but to make it practical in Roughly 500 Words, let’s think about two things: Outputs and Inputs. The Outputs are those core outcomes required to execute your strategy effectively. Outcomes depend on organizational capabilities, understood functionally (e.g., engineering, finance) or across competencies (e.g., customer experience, project management). The Inputs are the individual capabilities – what employees and teams do – and how they use those skills and abilities to create outputs. The leader’s role here is to identify those core organizational capabilities required and build structure and systems to enable individuals to develop the required outputs. The leader must also understand the strengths and gaps in her organization and use that knowledge to make investment decisions into strategy, organizational capabilities, and individual capabilities.   

Let’s bring this to life and return to the analogy from the last post: a symphony orchestra. We covered how the strategy and goals of the orchestra are dependent upon the conductor’s ability to organize the instrument section and the individual players in a way that creates balance and harmony. To extend the analogy further, the conductor seeks to maximize the orchestra’s organizational capabilities, which are the abilities of each section and the overall outcomes of the orchestra (i.e., the sound and quality of music). To do so, she makes sure she has the best individual players, and they are organized, balanced, and prepared to play the music at the highest level. The conductor can also use this knowledge to select pieces of music that work best with the orchestra and the audience and make sure the orchestra’s capabilities meet the audience’s expectations. When successful, the organizational capabilities (e.g., all trombonists collectively playing their parts, synchronized with one another, and in harmony with the rest of the orchestra) are enabled by individual capabilities (e.g., each trombonist’s talent, practice, and execution).  

In the next post, we will connect capabilities to broader organizational concepts, looking at operating models and organizational design. These two concepts primarily relate to Outputs, but they help us to also think about how we organize our Inputs.  

Until then, please let me know your thoughts on this series or topics you would like me to cover in the future. 

-Paul