57: Talent Troubles - 2. Rigid Roles

"It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do." - Steve Jobs. Knowledge working is a lot about creativity and creative work needs room for flexibility and alternate options.

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Rigid roles curtail creativity, impede innovation, and minimize the enthusiasm of an otherwise motivated individual.

Today's leaders and companies face tremendous challenges and fantastic opportunities. They must demonstrate speed, agility, and differentiated talent capabilities to succeed in this market.

The reality around Job Descriptions

There are three aspects of the JD evaluation, and they align with various states in the hiring and job performance process:?

1. Application Stage: JDs are broad for a purpose. While crafting job descriptions, the hiring managers and the recruiting team try to cast a wide net in terms of experience, business, tech, or process expertise, a wide variety of industry exposure, and the ability to work in demanding and complex situations.
2. Interview Stage: JDs describe only some aspects of the job. Depending on the interview panel and the candidate's responses/questions, certain aspects of the job are discussed during the interviews. The focus here is on "What's in it for me?" from every interviewer's perspective.
3. On the Job: JDs are 100% accurate (for whatever is written) only at the time of writing. Once on the job, the immediate opportunities and challenges to the manager and team take center stage. While we still have to work towards the stakeholder's goals, much of the work usually happens within the function's confines.

The problem with a fixed approach

Knowledge working is highly effective when no hierarchy or confined boundaries are imposed. To the minimal extent required, those lines can exist for organizational functioning but never for thinking or delivering results. This applies to both employees and consultants.

Your problems and opportunities are not isolated. Your strategy and solutions shouldn't be either.

When a solution architect is hired to support the new initiatives and told that she needs to stay in her lane and not worry about the business requirements or the timing of the deliverables, it makes no sense. A solution architect's role is to go across the business and technology areas, and the more early exposure the person gets at the ideation and requirements phase, the better the solution can be.

We also see many curious, talented doers and leaders from the business asking questions about technology areas. Instead of welcoming their questions and interest and providing them with the right level of early engagement, if teams take to protecting the turf, we are operating with a '90s mindset.

How do we solve this?

Beyond making it easy to work across functional boundaries and with limited hierarchical or bureaucratic limitations, what else can we do to remove role rigidity? Many ways have worked for me over the years, and I list some of the more prominent ones here.

1. Define the role but not too tight

Understanding that a role's needs and a person's capabilities and potential continue to change and evolve is crucial to success. Our possibilities change constantly; new market opportunities develop, new technological advances exist, and team members join and exit, creating ongoing changes.

2. Three parts of every role

For every role I have ever interviewed for or when I hire someone, my approach has been to assess/define the role on a 3-point scale.

• What can you do for the company based on what you know that I know?
• What can you do for the company based on what you know that I do not know?
• What new learning and growth can come from this role that will increase my/your value?

Below is an example of how this can be defined for a technology leader role:

This approach is intentionally designed to eliminate any role rigidity. It is focused on leveraging the individuals' talent, experience, expertise, and capabilities to the maximum extent while continuously elevating their talent potential. This will enable accelerated growth for the person and better leadership use for the company.

3. Hire for talent and not the JD

As I mentioned earlier in this article, JDs are valid only when they are written. Hiring a candidate just for the JD's requirements, which are bound to change rapidly, is a missed opportunity to bring in a talented employee/consultant who can operate well beyond our immediate needs.

Taking a broader view of the individual's talent and being open to role extension or expansion opportunities makes creating teams of A-level players easy.

4. Promote phase-based leadership

I will revisit this approach as a separate article in this series. Phase-based leadership breaks away from the leader and doer hierarchies. It enables people at any level, independent of title or position, to take a lead role in driving the project phase.

5. Encourage early engagement

Business functions and job families are necessities. They must exist to ensure specialized work happens within each segment. However, as in the Solution Architect example I mentioned earlier, we do not have to keep it a hard line.

Invite the people from the following segments to participate in your planning and ideation-related work.

This will help tremendously in creating a smooth flow across job families and also aid in capturing gaps, missed requirements, potential barriers, risks, and misunderstandings earlier.

6. Do not differentiate employees from consultants

The only differentiation between employees and consultants is who pays them, provides benefits, and what legal arrangement separates the two. For all purposes of work, both types of workers together constitute your talent pool.

Too often, we see highly talented consultants need to be more utilized and effective in solving big problems or pursuing excellent opportunities just because they aren't employees.

In the modern workforce, it must be expected to see experienced leaders working as leader-doer consultants (the Corpsulting approach from Khyanafi is just that), and an open mind is needed to engage them effectively to create more widespread results.

In Closing

"Just do what is expected of you," "Stay in your lane," or "That's not your responsibility" are lazy and controlling statements. We need to take advantage of great opportunities by avoiding rigid roles. They are a thing of the past, and any company and leader who wants to build a team of leaders, thinkers, and achievers must consistently break the boundaries to promote greater collaboration, partnership, and learning.

Here are the six ways to break out of the box:

1. Define the role but not too tight
2. Three parts of every role
3. Hire for talent and not the JD.
4. Promote phase-based leadership.
5. Encourage early engagement.
6. Do not differentiate employees from consultants

Wishing you most and more...

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