It’s one of those simple questions that has a simple answer. People can often recite their job description or simply give you a copy to save time. Depending on the person, the question “what’s your job” can illicit a variety of responses. Coming from a consultant tends to put a spin on the question as well. People can be very territorial and the interpretation of the question behind the question is often some flavor of – “are you trying to eliminate my job?”.
So forget someone external is asking the question and simply ask yourself. Is it just the items on your job description or is there more to it than that? Many people will never ask the question. So lets look at it a different way.
What is the impact of your job?
Are you an approver, a repairer, or a creator? Depending on where you in the organization you may be non of these, or all of these. They are just examples. Typically you receive something from one person or you may create something that you pass on to someone else. What happens when you do your job well? And what happens when you aren’t as effective?
Many times organizations evolve around the people, especially in bureaucratic organizations where people don’t leave. You end up with top heavy organizations where value isn’t always apparent, but their negative impact often is. If Mr. X has to approve all requisitions, what happens when Mr. X goes on vacation, or is too busy to get to something. Everything else downstream comes to a screeching halt.
What if this responsibility was scaled so different people at different levels had authority at their own level. Lower value purchases take less time since they don’t have to go all the way to the top. And only the highest value contracts need to go all the way through the process. For those few times when the approver is not available, a contingency is probably readily available, or a delay probably has minimal impact since this probably part of a long term project.
The value of sub-optimization
One of the challenges with processes is they are not always self contained, but organizations look at them that way. I once worked on a process improvement process where we quickly learned that no matter what changes we made, it would make no difference on the outcome because we were dependent on another organization to complete. This answer didn’t sit well with my boss who not only didn’t want to hear my explanation as to why we couldn’t improve our cycle time internally. Not only did he not like my answer, he liked my solution even less.
I’ve found that there is an almost pathological reluctance among some senior managers to address solutions that are outside their own control. One phone call, and probably a couple meetings would have fixed the problem. But it never happened. Over the years, I’ve seen this scenario play itself out many times. It often allows problems with simple solutions to go on for years just because someone wouldn’t make a phone call.
Ignoring the Problem
One organization I worked for several years ago had an interface with another agency that didn’t work correctly. Rather than make a call to fix the problem, they assigned 4 people to manually correct the problems. This was almost 10 years ago. As far as I know they are still in those same roles today. It would have cost less than $20,000 to fix the problem. They have spent over $2M in salaries since the problem was originally identified.
The logic behind this still eludes me. The first time I encountered it, my boss decided to set me down and show me the light. He explained to me the value of sub-optimization. Basically our responsibility is to make our organization work the best way possible, but we just focus on us. Everyone has their own responsibilities. We don’t want to mess with what they are doing, and we don’t want them messing with us. It never made sense to me when I heard it, so I’m probably not relaying his wisdom correctly. To me it is an exercise in creating golden cogs. We applaud or efforts to make one thing as close to perfect as possible, but completely ignore the fact that the whole machine doesn’t work correctly. This myopic view of an organization may show up at all levels of an organization.
I didn’t know we did that
People who create or run a “golden cog” organization are generally respected and admired within their organization. Why mess with success? It’s easy to see when it is working well. It’s self contained and people can generally understand what is going on. Success is obvious, but failure is often hidden.
At one organization where I was working on a process improvement project we did a final review both with the senior person from the process owner, but also with the heads of the other departments. We did this for a couple of reasons. When people know things too well, they often leave out steps when describing it to others. We also did it to make sure the process made sense to someone who might not be as familiar with it. What we didn’t anticipate was that people were surprised at what was actually happening.
I remember one person who was very well respected within the organization and was clearly in line to run things in the future. He immediately pointed out one of our process maps was wrong. To which the head of that organization countered with “no it’s not”. After about 5 minutes of discussion he responded with “I didn’t know we did that”. Aside from learning a bit about the organization, he also learned that one of his “golden cogs” wasn’t working as well as he thought.
Conversation leads to change
While it might take some serious arm twisting for organizations to talk to one another, once both sides see what is happening in the other organization learning is likely to take place. Things that they may not individually have any control over, may suddenly appear controllable together. With any luck this leads to finding a solution that generally only requires little more than communication. Chances are you will also have a new answer to the question of “what’s your job?”.
