Scaling Up: Harvard Business School’s Approach to Job Design
Having worked at scaling-up various startup companies, you quickly come to realize the importance of hiring the right people for critical roles. The only way to succeed is to move quickly and to do so with a structured, strategically sound plan. This is where the Harvard Business School Strategy Execution program outlines a framework to set up job design for success. Whether it is in Marketing exclusively, or in other parts of the organization... the methodology is the same and equally effective. Read on.
Scaling Marketing (… or Any Team)
Scaling a marketing team in a startup means paying attention to job design, an important yet often overlooked exercise. Based on research by Robert Simons, Baker Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School, consider the four important elements to correctly define key roles:
Putting forethought into the design of important roles with these four perspectives will help you strategically scale up your teams. It ensures that each role is set up for success and will contribute as needed - to the full effect.
Span of Control
Although span of control is often exclusively thought to be the number of people reporting to a position, it includes more than that. Consider the entire range of resources this position will have to deploy to get the job done. This includes people, budgets, balance sheet assets, and infrastructure. Think beyond the number of individuals reporting to a position and consider aspects such as defining products, pricing, and messaging too.
Span of Accountability
This refers to the range of responsibilities and authority an individual or team holds within an organization. It outlines the tasks, decisions, and outcomes for which they are held responsible. In other words, this directly speaks to developing your strategy as a plan. What are the goals, metrics, and objectives this role must achieve.
A narrow span implies focused responsibilities. Defining the span clarifies roles, fosters a focus on hard deliverable outcomes, and aligns efforts with organizational objectives. It enables effective decision-making, resource allocation, and performance evaluation.
In effect, span of accountability is determined by the range of trade-offs that the role in question can make, to achieve their targets. These are the performance metrics against which the role will be evaluated.
Span of Influence
Span of Influence is the extent of impact and ability to inspire and motivate others that an individual or leader possesses within an organization. It represents the reach and effectiveness of their influence needed to shape opinions, drive change, and achieve desired outcomes. Think of it as how wide a net must be cast to collect data, find out new information, or attempt to influence the work of others. A wide span of influence often indicates a person's capacity to positively influence a network of colleagues, teams, and stakeholders. It fosters collaboration, innovation, and a culture of shared goals. All this to get a job done.
From the perspective of defining a marketing role, think about who this person must influence to achieve their goals. How much is this employee expected to engage with others to get their job done? Think about whether this person will largely spend their day on their own to achieve a task, like a coder. Are they largely working in isolation without a heavy need for interactions with other people or teams? Or, will the role need a wider span of influence to get projects completed, like a sales manager? In this case the sales manager gets their work done largely through the work and efforts of others.
Span of Support
Finally, span of support refers to the range and effectiveness of assistance, resources, and guidance that this role can expect to receive within the organization – to help them with their job. It is the extent to which support, mentorship, and encouragement to foster growth and success, will be afforded to the role. It comes does to how much support can be expected when this role reaches out to others.
Questions you must ask here are whether the a wide span of support will be provided to positively impact a larger network of colleagues, teams, and stakeholders. Can this role expect an environment of collaboration, empathy, and mutual aid? Or is it a role meant to be highly independent, with little influence or help coming from other sources?
Today, most companies highlight their collaborative, and team oriented work environments and cultures. Many, if not most jobs may fall into this broad category of receiving high levels of support both from their direct manager, and from the organization as a whole. However there are jobs and circumstances that do not provide high levels of support to certain positions. An example might be a bond trader who is largely left to their own devices. Another example is that of a senior auditor. This position by its very nature may require a very high level of independence with little expected support from either the direct manager for others. In fact in a role like this influence from other factions might be detrimental. A forensic accountant should not be affected by the persuasion of other teams or even their direct managers. It is too easy to fall on the slippery slope of 'looking the other way' on a minor infraction, only to later discover a deeper and wider chasm from what is acceptable.
More on Spans of Support
There are four attributes that characterize high span of support organizations:
Briefly, a strong sense of mission characterizes having a clear purpose. A great example is the US Marine Corp where the primary responsibility and duty of each member is to complete their mission AND to help their colleagues. This is so strongly instilled with the marines that helping another marine may even include forfeiting one's own life.
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Strong identity with the group often comes from hiring practices that are very selective for a company. In effect the employees feel like they are part of an elite team. As such they're more willing to help others within that company.
Trust is among the most important elements in leadership. Trust happens when helping someone else on your team - opens yourself up to vulnerabilities. This happens in companies with a high level of confidence that actions to help others will not come back to hurt the helper.
Finally, fairness and equity in rewards are important because employees will not be eager to help someone who is unfairly getting all of the rewards, or the lion's share of the rewards.
Entrepreneurial vs Compliance Gap
For a scale up company defining marketing roles (or any other for that matter), you need to be careful about whether you are creating an entrepreneurial gap or a compliance gap.
An entrepreneurial or compliance gap happens when there is a difference between your span of control and your span of accountability. Think of all these spans as a measure of 1 to 10, where one is a low span of ..., and 10 is a high span of .... If you estimate the role to have a span of control which is low let's say two out of 10, but your span of accountability is high, say 8 out of 10, then you have an entrepreneurial gap. Span of accountability greater than span of control is an entrepreneurial gap. If the cases were reversed with a high span of control and a low span of accountability then you would have a compliance gap.
As Simons points out, “entrepreneurs are individuals who pursue opportunities without regard to the resources they currently control” to get a job done. A job with an entrepreneurial gap where accountability is higher than control - inspires that individual to seek out opportunities and to influence others in order to succeed at the matter at hand.
Think of the compliance gap as the reverse of the entrepreneurial gap. As expressed earlier not all roles should have an entrepreneurial spin. In other words you may not want to incent the accounting team to make wild estimations, take excess risk, nor to use their creativity when reporting the company's financial metrics.
X-Test
Similar to the economics concept of supply and demand curves, think of job design as one of creating a balance between the supply of resources and demand for resources. In the figure shown above taken from the Harvard Business School job design optimization tool, it shows a dotted line connecting the span of control and span of support positions. It then also has a dotted line connecting the span of accountability and span of influence levels. When these two dotted lines cross to form an ‘X’ it means the supply of resources and demand for resources for this particular position - is in balance.
In effect, this is a well balanced job design which is set up for success (shown in figure 1).
On the other hand, figure 2 shows an example where the span of accountability and span of influence line does not intersect with the span of control and span of support line. Think of the span of control and span of support line as representing the supply of resources. Think also of the span of accountability and span of influence line as representing the demand for resources. As such in figure 2 the supply and demand lines don't cross and there is no point of equilibrium. That means from the outset the job design is not set up for success.
Best of Intentions vs Reality
What we stepped through above is an excellent, well formulated technique for job design developed by the Harvard Business School (Professor Robert Simons). For any company which is scaling-up, this is important. You want to set up your company for success at the fastest pace possible. As such you want to set up your people to succeed at their own goals as quickly as possible as well. After all, a company progress comes from the successes of the individuals. Success at both levels means that you are creating a unified environment to make an impact. Using this tool to take a strategic approach to your job designs will be a tremendous help to scaling your company or team.
Please reach out to me (Charles Dimov), should you have any challenges or need help at using this tool for your own scale-up.