Email Q&A: Forget Competencies, Job Descriptions, Etc. – Improve the System

Occasionally I receive an email query which leads into an interesting and broadly applicable dialogue. Here’s an (anonymized) conversation about job descriptions and competency models, and how their influence on manager performance often pales in comparison to context and culture.

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Dear Ed,

What would you say is the primary work of a department manager? We’re making plans to further develop our people in that role, and I’m getting ready to talk with the leaders who supervise them in hopes of defining our largest gaps. I’m trying to figure out how to frame up those conversations.

I grew up professionally in TQM and high-volume production, so I tend toward making fishbone diagrams with categories like manpower, method, material, machine, and measurement. This approach captures a lot of content and would certainly provide a good visual starting point. I’m just not sure that it will let me go deep enough into aspects like character, execution, alignment, vision, communication, accountability, and competence – to name a few. I don’t want to minimize these as I know they’re important, but I also don’t want my initial framework to be too complex.

An alternate idea would be to start with our job descriptions, role checklists, and general competency model for the role. The thing is, although creating those elements felt like an important exercise, they have been in place for a while and if I’m honest I just don’t think they are helping us truly evaluate performance or deeply identify improvement areas. This is especially true when it comes to issues like the tension our department managers face between delivering immediate results and preparing our organization for the future. It seems like we always have issues like that one - things we’re ‘talking around’ but not ‘about.’

So where do I start? Do I add a “soft skills” category (or five) to my fishbone? Do I try to revise our job descriptions and add more detail to our competency matrices? Or do I tackle this a whole different way?

– Too Much Isn’t Enough

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Dear Too Much Isn’t Enough,

For years I’ve been watching HR departments run themselves ragged refining job descriptions, grade level expectations, skill lists, competency matrices, roles and responsibilities, and the like – all in hopes of having a better framework for hiring, evaluation, and/or development. And as a former-engineer-turned-management-consultant, I’ve been involved in my share of fishbone diagrams of hard and soft skills too. In both cases, there’s certainly value in the process. And yet, I know what you mean: it always seems like something's missing. No doubt, any of the “softer” elements on your lists (character, vision, communication, etc.) could be incorporated in either approach. But I think the deeper question here isn't which individual role-based framework is better, but whether an individual role-based framework is the way to go. I'm in the minority, I know, but I just don't think it is.

You’re talking about developing a population of managers, not an individual person. That's a systems need, so from my (admittedly Iterate-biased perspective) it’s simpler and more effective to start with the perspective of output needed by the system rather than characteristics defined by HR. So let’s draft the job description you requested, but keep it crazy-simple: The Department Manager’s role is to mobilize all the resources under his or her control to achieve the committed output of the department, and to ensure those commitments are kept at high but achievable levels. 

How well your managers collectively perform that job is a function of the system, not the individuals. I’m talking about the way they run staff meetings, collect information, hold people accountable, set the tone for subordinate managers, define processes for front line supervision, balance short- and long-term needs, advocate for specific programs, and a host of other specifics. If you’ve hired basically competent people, and you're looking at them as a group, the operational characteristics our job description requires you to develop are so heavily influenced by the context in which the role exists – what you might call the culture – that the level of skill of any one manager involved is a second-tier influence at best. You can't move the collective performance needle by creating ever more specific lists, choosing the lowest-scoring items on an average basis, and throwing related training at the whole population – and that's true no matter which individual, role-based framework you select to create the lists.

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Let me pause here for a second because I’m not na?ve. Individuals matter, and we’ve all seen cases where one manager really needed improvement in one area – communicating more clearly, for example, or being more approachable. But that's improving the performance of one person. You’re talking about improving the function collectively.  And when you look at everyone’s performance across any individual role-based framework, there are only two possibilities: either you’ll discover that different people have different needs, which means whatever focus you choose will only help a subgroup of the population, or you’ll discover that everyone has the same need, in which case I can pretty much guarantee there’s a systemic cause. Different people with different experiences hired at different times by different interviewers don’t all magically develop the same gaps, unless the system is causing them to do so.

I say, forget the individual, role-based frameworks for the time being. Work on improving group norms and behavioral habits around how middle and senior managers have agreed to run the organization. That's going to be a more robust solution, even if the individuals involved do have significant skill development needs.  I’ve been involved with multiple groups where one manager had a performance gap so severe that, at the outset, termination or resignation seemed unavoidable. Yet, when a systemic solution was implemented, the individual’s performance “turned around.” Did that person spontaneously gain new skills? Of course not. Despite all appearances to the contrary, it wasn’t ever true that the person was fundamentally unable to execute the needed behavior. The broader context (aka. culture) was preventing it! With the barrier removed, the “problem” disappeared. Much to the chagrin of individual role-based framework advocates everywhere, we didn’t even need to define the exact gap. We just needed to put the person in a context that allowed innate abilities to come through.

Of course, if innate abilities don't come through, you can always go back to your individual frameworks. They're super trendy and they're not going anywhere. The thing is, in my firm we’ve proven over and over again that if you hire mostly functional people, set mostly clear expectations about what you want them to accomplish, and then develop mostly productive and consistent habits and norms about how they work together, you’ll get an efficient and flexible organization. And you'll get to avoid squinting your way through job descriptions and competency matrices – often in 8-point font – that, despite being all the rage, more or less can be summarized as “be a functioning adult as you do this job.”

Plus there's more good news: working systemically will give you the credibility you seek with leadership too. Think about it: do you really want to be presenting survey results on which of the following 14 skills our department managers are worst at, and facilitating senior leaders’ arguments over categories, philosophy, and data? Wouldn’t you rather lead them in discussions about improving the whole organization’s performance at setting realistic yet aggressive targets, hitting them more often, and detecting problems earlier? Leadership will appreciate you spending their valuable time on making the organization function better, instead of on parsing what’s wrong with people who seemed competent enough when they were hired.  

Speaking of which, this path will also win you more credibility with your department managers themselves. They’ll appreciate that you’re trying to help them work on something together that they can’t work on alone. And, you'll avoid the perception (and reality) of being yet another detached learning professional who's offering “skill-building” to help them "get better" at things they already do in other contexts all the time – you know, when your organization isn’t in their way.

I know it's a bit off-trend, but try it. Show your leaders a sample high-functioning organization like this one, and ask them if moving your department managers closer to that standard would be valuable. Then, get to work figuring out how to move the culture in that direction by working with the managers collectively, not individually. You can always address any major skill gaps that surface along the way – that is, if they don’t automatically address themselves.

Want more? Visit the Group Harmonics Industry Intelligence Archive for ideas, whitepapers, and case studies about management culture and systemic solutions for issues that can't be solved with an individualistic approach.