July 2006

Innovation Tips

…ideas for building collaborative innovation

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Getting the Right People—the Extreme Makeover Job Description

 

Having hired the person with both the right attitude and the right aptitudes (See Innovation Tips April/May, June) we are now ready to get the right person started in the right work. The tried and true “job description” must be handled with care, for job descriptions, if handled poorly, can make the right person very wrong for the right organization.

 

The goal of the job description ought to be to liberate people rather than control them. The concept of the traditional job description needs an “extreme makeover.” That makeover starts with the cultural values of the organization.

 

The job description ought to include the “collegial call”—a commitment to the values of the organization that create social capital. Teamwork—helping others out—is often among the most important. The extreme makeover job description does not start with tasks, it starts with values, for the greatest asset held by most organizations is not the sum total of their people—human capital—but the exponential value of those people working cooperatively together—their social capital.

 

The mission of the work must also be made clear. It is not as important to delineate specific tasks as it is to delineate the purposeful value of those tasks. Under the extreme makeover version, a receptionist’s mission could be, for example, “to create great first impressions.”

 

Finally, the description of the work in the extreme makeover job description ought to be keyed to individual gifts. We all enjoy work more fully when we are doing work that we love. If we want to generate enthusiasm everywhere in the organization, we must take some time to sculpt people’s work to their best gifts.

 

An online job assessment at www.giftscompass.com (click on Job Matching) is now available that enables you to assess the gifts needed for a given job. It also enables people to assess their individual gifts to see how well they match the gifts for the job.

 

The purpose of that comparison is to optimize the value of the individual to the organization. The traditional job description is a holdover from the industrial age of scientific management when it was believed that efficiency equaled effectiveness. In today’s more innovative age of “knowledge workers,” effectiveness is more a function of individual gifts. Small teams of people with complementary gifts who are sharing work will often outperform groups of people doing the same work individually.

 

The value of people to the organization is optimized when they understand that the “collegial call” to teamwork is part of their role, when they are clear on how their role contributes value to the mission of the organization, and when they are using their best gifts in concert with others to accomplish that mission.

 

Please Complain!

We write these articles to support your work in building vital organizations. Please let us know if we are missing the mark. Tell us what else you want to learn. We depend on you for our subject matter, and as the subject of our work, you matter!

 

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Innovation Tips may be used, with permission, in company or association newsletters. Please email your request to info@partnersfi.com to receive formal permission to reproduce the copyrighted article.

 

Note: This is the last in a series of three issues on “Getting the Right People.” The next series will start with August/September and run through November. We hope you like the new format.

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