Wednesday, September 4, 2013

Doing it Right

In yesterday’s post I posed the question: “What, apart from hiring good people without any specific experience, skills or training and finding things for them to do – in effect, hiring people with good minds and growing our own specific personnel – can we possibly do about the current failure of the recruiting and hiring system in America?” Strangely enough, it looks as though the answer might really be: What’s wrong with hiring good, talented people and then arranging the job tasks around what they do well?”

I posted the link to the PBS News site yesterday, but here it is again if you need it. In his post, the PBS commentator notes that creating a job description and then attempting to find applicants to fit it is a lot like creating a product and then looking for a market that wants to buy it – a common mistake that I’ve also criticized in this space. Even if you can produce a completely accurate description of exactly what the applicant will be doing if they are hired – and this is rarely possible except in the most menial and repetitious jobs – there is still no assurance that somebody with previous experience but without talent, high intelligence, a compatible personality or a strong work ethic will perform as well as someone who has never worked before but has all of those positive traits. In fact, the published research suggests that none of the factors commonly referenced in job descriptions or want ads is the key indicator of high performance…

If you read the organizational behavior and human resources research (not that I am suggesting for one moment that anyone ought to read the organizational behavior and human resources research) you will find that the key factors in performance are conscientiousness and generalized cognitive intelligence, commonly abbreviated as the “G-Factor” or simply as “G.” There are going to be some exceptions, of course; someone who does not speak a language will not be able to speak it until they learn how, no matter how conscientious or intelligent they happen to be, and someone without a counseling license cannot (legally) counsel you to do anything about your personal problems. But the vast majority of employers will require that any particular job be done according to their specific standards, and many companies will insist on training (or re-training) new personnel to meet those standards regardless of any previous experience. Or, to put it another way, if you are going to train people to do things your way anyway, doesn’t it make sense to start with the best people?

Managers as a rule tend to assign tasks to whichever of their subordinates is best at that task; anything else would be a sub-optimal use of their resources. As a result, the employee doing any given task may not be the one who was hired to do that task, but rather the one who is the most competent. This concept takes that practice to its logical conclusion: advocating that the company assemble a pool of intelligent, talented, hard-working people and then assign each of them to complete tasks on the basis of ability and suitability rather than arbitrary job title or classification. Naturally, this will require a high degree of flexibility and improvisation on the part of the managers involved, and willingness on the part of the human resources department to put aside simple checklists and formal rating systems and actually consider the specific applicants who are available…

Which explains why, despite the relatively simplicity of the concept, and nearly a century of Management research to back up all of these contentions, there does not appear to be any major company using this method as of Fall 2013. I’m not saying that anyone out there could implement this kind of change by fiat, or by throwing a switch in the system somewhere. What I am advocating here would be a complete revolution in the way companies are staffed and managed, every bit as radical as Scientific Management in its own time. It would require the emergence of an actual profession of mangers, chosen for their ability to match employees with tasks, and resources with requirements, rather than the accident of their birth or the details of their previous work history – and no one in the world is likely to accept that idea without massive resistance. And yet, it’s the first thing we’ve seen to date that might actually give rise to the practice of management the way it should actually be…

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