Warning: Your Work Is NOT Your Job Description
There is a big emphasis in our organization in compiling job descriptions. Reality is, they are ditched as soon as someone gets the job for which they were written.
I have always been amazed by the attention that is placed on compiling the perfect job description that can define in the tiniest details the work that a person is going to do. I am also amazed about how this effort is useless in the real life. People got the position the job description was written for and immediately after they find themselves doing something completely different than expected. Did you notice it as well?
If you think about that for a minute, you will realize how difficult it is to analyze and formalize all the pieces of work that are required to make an organization run and even more if we want that organization to grow (whatever meaning we want to assign to it).
On top of this (and despite the great effort posed into the polished description) there is often confusion about who is going to do a certain job or what can we expect from our colleagues or what our colleagues can expect from us.
We think of the organizational structure as a set of static job positions connected among them through fixed and one-directional arrows that often indicate who is taking decisions (on one side of the line) and who should execute them (on the opposite side).
The reality is far more complex and it is comprised of a number of formal and informal relationships between the people working in an organization and also between the position they hold.
This reality acts underground with respect to what is evident on the surface and contributes to confusion and lack of clarity as well as to the rising of politics and hidden agendas endangering the very survival of the organization.
The real organization chart in any company is a spider web of informal relations. Unfortunately, we insist on forcing a pyramid structure onto this web, which distorts the natural flow of work (F. Laloux).
I have been looking for a long time for something able to declutter all this and generate clarity at all levels and make clear “who is doing what”. Eventually, I found Holacracy and I immediately recognize the potential of this “Operating System for Organization” to satisfy my need in this regard.
The separation between role and soul and the definition of the role itself is so powerful that allows addressing many of the issues described above. A role, in Holacracy, defines a chunk of the work that the organization has to carry out as a whole. The role is defined through one or more of these 3 elements: Purpose, Domain(s), and Accountabilities. It has not to be complex and defined in the greatest details and it defines just a piece of the work that is required to be executed. One person can fill (or energize) many roles and these can be very tiny assignments to be carried out in very few hours per year.
Bonus: Holacracy is an evolutionary system, which means that roles are added, deleted, or amended (in one or more of their 3 components) as required.
This simple configuration ensures that everything is clear to everybody and we know what to expect from others while others know what to expect from us at any time. Besides, the separation between a role and the person filling it ensures that nothing is taken personally and that the job is separated from the human relationship. Having many roles simply means that I identify with no one and I don’t become (obsessed with) my job position.
The human side of the organization stays there as it is known, in fact, it is enhanced. The clarity makes totally irrelevant who am I friends with or who is having an affair with who because we know exactly what to do and what to expect from who. We are allowed, then, to live more openly in our relationship without hiding them fearing that they will affect our careers or the way others look at us.
Without implementing Holacracy and even within a hierarchical organization it is possible to better design the way we manage the work and the way through which the different pieces of work that we need to do interact with each other towards common goals.
How are the roles defined in your organization and how do you feel about them?