One of the themes that has emerged from our collective experience, is the number of sleepless nights lost by executives and senior managers in wondering what their employees are doing. These are issues of governance. If we don’t know what is going on, then how can we be sure that we are acting in accordance with our collective aims, and also ethically? Not only this, but it seems that the fears of these executives are well-grounded. ER Consultants’ research on leadership strongly reinforces the view that many people in many businesses aren’t able to make sense of:

• their role
• the organisation they sit within
• goals they need to achieve 

If this is the case, then how can employees act in accordance with the collective aims? How can they learn to achieve ownership of the collective task? It seems that the way in which we identify and define the work that is carried out is crucial if effective governance is to take place. One way managers can enable better governance is through examining and transforming the ways by which work is bundled, described and executed.

The evolution of ‘jobs’ and ‘job descriptions’, and the implications for governance

Traditionally, ‘jobs’ have been defined by more senior managers for tasks carried out under their remit, occasionally with input from existing jobholders. This was done in order to clarify the skills needed to carry out the job. Further, the purpose of the job description was to determine grade and pay levels, and by implication, the importance of the boss’s empire. The job was described in terms of activities, available resources, constraints and possibly objectives. Some of the job descriptions were defined in terms of the purpose of the job, couched in terms such as: ‘manage the XYZ unit to meet profit targets within budget, on time’. Once described, the jobs in practice made little reference to the description, except as a defence (‘not in my job description’) and they remained more or less fixed.

During the past ten years, when change has been a significant aspect of most organisations, the most that has happened in terms of jobs and job descriptions has tended to be a re-positioning within a different managerial structure, and possibly some tinkering with the scope – now two jobs not one, or vice versa. If there were exceptions, the tendency has been for the manager to codify the response and add it to the other exception cases that then become attached to the job description, or more likely to the procedures manual. For some organisations, realising that little change had actually taken place, business process re-engineering was then introduced to help pin down and minutely define what people had to do – yet more definition, however.

So what is the impact of this approach on governance, in today’s ever-changing, flexible environment? Let’s examine a couple of scenarios:

Lightening

Lightening struck close to our house the other day. The telephone landline went down. The telephone operator’s automatic fault reporting system confirmed our line now had a fault. By pressing the next number we were able to find out the progress made in repairing the fault. This revealed the interesting but contradictory information that the line had been fixed. Quick work we thought save for the fact that the line was still not working. Perplexed, I tried again, same result, yes there is a fault and yes it has been repaired and the phone still not working! After 35 minutes holding for a real human with whom to discuss this paradox I was confronted by an adamant woman who told me that I couldn’t possibly have gone through the automatic fault reporting system as there was no record of this on her screen. She explained to me with increasing irritation that she was only doing her job. I’m sure she was and that she had a precise job role built from a precisely defined process that was unable to deal with some of the variances that real life was throwing at her. So, in her terms she was fulfilling her job but in the customer’s terms she was not.

The ever greater specification of roles and processes rapidly runs out of road.
The density of specification is greater than any man or woman can comprehend and, how ever many algorithms are incorporated to deal with every eventuality, it will never be enough. The existence of the human factor, both in our capacity to hold volumes of detail and our need to make our own sense of things, also scuppers any chance of omnipotent and repeated precision.

Enlightened

Working with a director of an organisation, I ran a workshop with her 30 people (different levels) on a new organisation vision and mission focusing on the goals for their function – mapping their collective contribution in making the organisation successful. We mapped out the critical activities that would deliver the required outcomes, using flipcharts spread across the floor. We invited people to reflect on their capabilities and to indicate on the charts where they could best add value – what chunks of activity they wanted to own. That also allowed us to see where gaps might be and where there were ‘too many cooks’. What was great was the energy and enthusiasm the group had for owning significant chunks of activity, while also revealing capabilities that had hitherto been untapped. As they discussed what they each could bring, more and more ideas emerged that added value to their contribution so that they soon had set themselves more ambitious targets.

A fear had been that group members would want to be given boundaries and clear lines of demarcation which would trigger disagreements about who did what. But not a bit of it, they talked in terms of the bigger picture and how they would have to work together to manage the tensions and dilemmas as they arose. What a delight to work with such a group!

What was it that gave them the confidence about working in this rather loose way? Well, they shared a context that appealed to them all, that was understood sufficiently consistently for them to operate by a ‘code of conduct’, a set of commonly held rules. If you like, they had developed their own game, and while every one adhered to the rules the game would be played effectively. Their game was one of shared ownership of goals, shared understanding of the ‘greater good’, offering genuine capability, working for the best outcomes rather than selfish pursuits, and negotiating at points of contention so that outcomes were achieved.

In fast-moving environments, managers cannot hope to specify for every eventuality. We need to encourage people to understand the wider context, work with them to check that a common sense is being developed, and enable them to make decisions based on that common sense. That way we can build up a virtuous circle, and avoid the vicious circle.

However, we can see that this wider approach works best in an environment where dialogue rather than communication is the norm: where openness, sharing and feedback are regarded as tools to do the job well, to deliver the outcomes we have accepted as ours to deliver. We can also see that, where exceptions are likely to arise, which is becoming far more the case in the fast-moving environment of the 21st century, endless specification is unlikely to work. Our organisations need to keep pace with the times and the way in which our economies are constructed. Khrushchev, in the old USSR, may well have had a director of supermarkets, yet, no one sits on top of Asda, Tesco and Sainsbury and orders their market. We have a series of players playing within a set of competition rules that spontaneously creates a highly attractive market place for the consumer without someone on top having to direct it all. (I’m sure we would all be worried if we had.) We need to be able to create aspects of that spontaneous order within our companies.

If everything stays the same, as it did in the old USSR, specification can work. However, if we try to retain the old methods of specification each time a new issue arises then we are setting ourselves up to fail and also those working with or for us! What we need is leadership on the context and direction for what we do and encouragement and training in managing the issues within that framework of commonly held sense. Defining the job becomes then an active rather than passive or reactive activity. However, we cannot rule out the need for specifying, otherwise chaos will ensue, and governance will fall. So how do we achieve
the balance between over-specification and the ambiguity or doubt that exists in more ‘spontaneous’ organisations which may cause risks to be missed, decisions to be over-stepped or ignored? How do we hold governance together?

Here are some broad suggestions:

• Develop and check people’s sense of the organisation and how their piece fits the delivery of ultimate goals.
• Define jobs as deliverables, what people will be held to account to deliver.
• Develop clear and shared understanding of the meaning of accountabilities.
• Provide an explicit set of authorities to act.
• Make explicit feedback mechanisms that ensure variation and failure are recognised; ensure people understand and use these.
• Define the principal management processes that govern the business and ensure they are understood and operated.
• Encourage and develop people to take responsibility for optimising how they will deliver their accountabilities in negotiation with others, for the greater good of the organisation. 

So how can we better describe the chunks of work we call jobs?

We have flagged up that no organisation is static, we constantly need to evolve and meet unforeseen circumstances. When we are developing the capability of our organisation, we need to consider the need to create an environment for ‘spontaneous order’ to emerge. This means that we need a style, behaviour, way of working that can integrate and negotiate roles and accountabilities. Managers need to have the space and ability to negotiate their role with their peers, those with whom they interface, inside and outside the organisation. However, we also need to apply specificity within this mindset so that we focus flexibility and responsiveness to deliver the collective outcomes demanded by the business. Along with feedback mechanisms that tell you whether staff are performing according to accountabilities or where improvement is required, this approach offers greater confidence that the right jobs are being devised and operated – in short it offers us confidence that people are doing what you expect them to do, and that they are being well-governed and self-governing.

This article aims to show that people doing the ‘right’ things in the ‘right’ places, and feeling motivated to do so, is a crucial part of good governance. Confidence that this is the case starts with our approach to defining jobs– how to give directional sense while involving jobholders in developing responsiveness.

For further information, please contact Ann Gammie:
T 44(0) 1223 31594
E ann.gammie@erconsultants.co.uk