Thought Experiment #29: Every company needs a Head of Role Design

This is the fourth of a series of posts looking at new strategic roles. Roles which most organisations don’t have but would do well to create.

Part one explored why every company needs a Head of Experimentation. Part two explored the need for a Head of New Relationships, and in this post I’ll look at the case for a Head of Role Design or a Chief Role Designer.

I’ll explore some of the existing problems this role can solve, and some ways to solve them, such as [role] incubators. My insights are drawn from self-designing my own roles as head of market intelligence and as a director of innovation – as well as testing, creating and hiring for new strategic roles that have not previously existed in the organisations I’ve worked at.

Eight problems that a Head of Role Design can solve for:

• 1. Lack of a disciplined approach to human capital: The biggest cost to most organisations is people. Yet, the rigour applied to leveraging capital expenditure is not applied to human capital. Ignoring the fact that only about 15% of an average company’s employees are difference makers (HBR), I'm sure the pareto-principle applies to virtually all roles. There is a lot of ‘busy work’ going on inside every organisation, but only 20% of that work creates real value. Helping the individuals to identify this 20% and, crucially, to say no to the 80% to create more room for high-value work, is a massive problem that needs solving.
• 2. Lack of agility: For most knowledge-centred jobs, the job-spec goes out of the window very soon after the person is hired. Employees, from executive to front-line, do not have a 'real-time' view of roles inside organisations. As a result, the agility and iteration required in their role is reserved for yearly or at best quarterly conversations. Just as we apply lean development to products and services, we would do well to apply lean principles to roles. With organisations facing an unparallelled speed of change, some components of every role need to be tweaked on a monthly if not weekly basis.
• 3. Struggles with the last mile of any (strategic) change: Every organisation has a hundred and one change initiatives. But, most struggles with change are in the ‘last-mile’ – the place where people design, define, and execute their roles. Roles are a critical unit of change.
• 4. Reactionary designers: 67% of executives struggle to unshackle themselves from stuff their predecessor did, even though they know it adds little value (HBR). This is because few employees see themselves as active designers of their role. Instead, they are reactionary or unconscious designers of their own roles. There is a tremendous amount of potential in individually helping employees acquire the knowledge, skills, tools and, crucially, the mindsets to (re)design their own role.
• 5. Hiring managers are not experts at role design: All too easily and quickly, hiring managers with no explicit expertise in designing roles create internal-facing roles with ‘busy work’ that focus on outputs and not outcomes. Hiring managers don’t need more training or coaching, but active co-creation to design roles that are external facing to generate a higher return on investment.
• 6. Set up to fail: Many new strategic roles are set up to fail, generally because the problem, purpose and people (interfaces) of the role are left unanswered. Often, organisations or hiring managers do not figure out exactly what they need until the second or third generation of the role. In the latest HBR issue, the focus is on why so many Chief Marketing Officer roles fail, largely because of poor role design: “when responsibilities, expectations, and performance measures are not aligned and realistic, it sets a CMO up to fail”.
• 7. It takes too long for new strategic roles to be established: Although the role of the midwife has existed in some shape or form since as long as humans have existed, I’ve read that it took the more than 50 years for the role to be established in the NHS (for the life of me I can’t track down the source). It short, it takes too long for new roles to be established as ‘new norms’ inside organisations.
• 8. Lack of rigour applied to new strategic roles: There is no shortage of 'problems' inside every organisation. Now either the hiring managers' recognise the problem, but it doesn’t neatly fit into the organisational chart or hierarchy, and because no one owns the problem a role is never created to solve for it. Or, the hiring manager sees a problem inside the organisation – it’s too slow, not as innovative as its competitors, there are unrealised opportunities, it lacks the capabilities to carry out planned strategy. The solution? A new role, say, Chief Innovation Officer is created. But, the hiring manager lacks expertise in this specific area, so seeks advice from other company executives, external experts, and perhaps executive recruiters. An internal business case (PowerPoint or Word narrative) and a job-spec are created. However, the biggest problem occurs when hiring managers don’t do the pre-job-spec work with structure and rigour. Given they’re not ‘experts’ in innovation, they leave too much for the person hired to fill this new role to figure out, rather than validating what the role is/isn't. This is a festering ground of misaligned expectations.

Head of Role Design’s job is:

One key way to transforming, changing or innovating our organisations lies in creating new strategic roles, whose job it is to create new systems, capabilities and capacity.

Yet, I’ve not come across (and please let me know if you have) an internal or external agency that helps organisations create new strategic roles.

The Head of Role Design is this agency. This person takes a nebulous process and turns it into a rigorous and structured approach to re-designing existing roles and creating new strategic roles. The Head of Role Design searches for business problems inside the organisation, takes co-ownership of these problems, and solves for them by creating new roles.

One way to do this, by way of example, is for the Head of Role Design to design and run [role incubators]:

• Step 1: Together with the hiring manager (executives/senior management) they design and run a series of experiments to test the riskiest assumptions behind the role. It treats the strategic roles as similar to an internal startup, where validation is more important than plans and specs. The hiring manager may hire a freelancer to test a very specific hypothesis, learn first-hand with failures, and provide evidence of value through quick-wins. Thus, she can better quantify the problem and purpose of the role. The central approach here is that hiring managers should hire to either scale what works and/or to correct failure. They should not be hiring for someone to spend their first six months ‘searching’ for their true role. And of course, it’s much easier to get new and hard-to-approve roles green-lighted when you are scaling something that already has concrete evidence.
• Step 2: A bespoke process of hiring for a new strategic role: This includes the creation a realistic hiring-case, evidence of internal demand, how this role interfaces with the rest of the organisation, a job-spec, and the interview process. We have a series of one-page toolkits designed for this purpose. If you are interested in receiving PDFs, please email me at [email protected]

• Step 3: Help incubate the role in the first 90 days: The Head of Role Design incubates the new-hire with thought-leadership, the internal and external networks that would support the role, the tools and approaches needed to accelerate to quick wins, and the inevitable redesign of the role as the person employed brings their own experiences and new perspectives to the problems. This is not onboarding, nor is it just coaching – it’s incubating.

Right now, these three steps fall on hiring managers. As a result, all three steps are either skipped, executed sub-optimally, or simply take too long, because every hiring manager invents their own approach to the creation of new roles. For example, in my previous head of innovation role, it took me a year to build the confidence and evidence to create a new strategic role.

The above three-step structure, designed and owned by the Head of Role Design, is meant to help hiring managers to take a better and faster approach to hiring for strategic roles.

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In summary, organisations spend a tremendous amount of money and resources on recruitment, but very little on maximising the returns from each and every role. It’s the job of Head of Role Design to help people, from executives to frontline employees, to (re)design existing roles and help create new strategic roles. The potential value-creation is huge.

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And, thank you in advance for reading and engaging with this post. In the next post, I will explore a new role: Head of Stories.