Managing People

Preamble

This article concludes a series of three articles that describes how to get clarity about your present role in your organization and write an effective job description.

• The first article established that writing a job description for your present position will help you clarify your role and establish a sense of better control and direction over your job. See full article here.
• Yesterday’s article described how to conduct a job analysis: how to thoroughly document your understanding of your role, its scope and context. See full article here.

Write Your Job Description

After completing a thorough job analysis, you should have a list of responsibilities and goals for your position. Here is how to organize this list and write a formal job description:

• A job description should be a high-level synopsis of the expectations of your role. It need not be all-encompassing or list specific tasks you required of you (that is the function of a ‘work-plan,’ where you translate your job description into a more-detailed list of tasks, projects and measures.)
• Prioritize your ideas and responsibilities. Group ideas by functional theme if possible. Each theme can then be written as a paragraph (or bullet point) in your job description.
• List no more than four or five paragraphs of responsibilities. Depending on your position, you may not need a very detailed list of responsibilities. For example, a worker on an assembly line may have just a single paragraph in his job description while an administrative assistant may have a more complex description of duties organized into three or four paragraphs of responsibilities.
• Each paragraph can consist of as many sentences as necessary to describe a responsibility precisely. Begin each sentence with a verb in present tense. See examples below.
• If your job involves supervising other employees, include the scope of responsibilities—coaching, training, conducting performance reviews, etc.

Get Concurrence from Your Supervisor

In your next one-on-one meeting with your supervisor, set aside some time to discuss your job description. Ask, “Is this what you expect of me? Is this in line with how you and our management see my role? Am I missing any responsibility or initiative? Do you see anything differently?”

Consider translating this job description into a more detailed work-plan that expands your responsibilities into a more thorough list of projects, initiatives and goals, and the corresponding metrics and targets. This work-plan along with your job description can establish a basis for measurement and job appraisal.

Revise Often and Maintain

Organizations, their objectives, routines and expectations constantly change. Keep your job descriptions current and accurate. Share your job description with your supervisor as part of the performance review process and continually seek agreement on how he sees your job.

Job Description Example 1: Software Architect

• Research and develop algorithms for automatic parameter-based design of passenger car engines and their machining process illustrations. Implement process-planning software in C++ and integrate an interface with a CAD software.
• Develop and implement algorithms to translate triangulated computer models into boundary representation data structures and recognize geometric features for design and machining.
• Research and develop algorithms for automatic conversion of two dimensional orthographic projections of mechanical engineering designs into three-dimensional solid models.

Job Description Example 2: Project Manager

• Coordinate new projects with Marketing. Write software technical profile from customer requirements. Develop and execute actionable plans for development and implementation of new software. Manage relationships and facilitate cross-functional issue resolution between marketing, customer support and customers.
• Recruit and supervise five software engineers. Manage engineers’ work loads and ensure contribution. Track, prioritize, report and coordinate the needs and progress of their projects.
• Coordinate software programming between offices in cities A and B and track measures for on-time performance of projects.

Concluding Thoughts

One of the leading causes of frustration and discontent for employees is the lack of clarity on what is expected on their roles. From an organization’s perspective, employees who do not understand their roles will fail to deliver.

By writing an effective job description for your present position, you can bridge the gap between the expectations of your role and your performance on your job. This generates better results for you, your management and the organization as a whole.

Preamble

This article is the second in a series of three articles that describes how to get clarity about your present role in your organization and write an effective job description. Yesterday’s article established that writing a job description for your present position will help you clarify your role and establish a sense of better control and direction over your job. See full article here.

Before you begin writing your job description effectively, you need to thoroughly document your understanding of your role, its scope and context. This is the intention of job analysis.

Step 0: Prepare and Survey

You should have been on your current job for a suitably long-enough period of time, ideally three to four months, to develop a fairly reasonable perspective of your job and its requirements. Collect a job description if one exists for your role, your boss’s and your employees’ job descriptions if they exist, your organization’s objectives and any metrics that you report on a regular basis. Study these documents carefully.

Step 1A: Focus on Contribution to the Whole

Yesterday’s article established that your job exists to fulfill an essential function of your organization. Therefore, at the outset, your job analysis should focus on this specific need of the organization.

Identify the goals and the end-product of your organization. If you work at a larger organization, focus on the product of your business division or department. Ask, “Who is the customer of our organization? What do we produce? What service do we deliver?” Then, examine how your role fits in this larger context. Ask, “What contribution does my role make to this whole? How do I add value? How does my work contribute to the performance and results of my organization?”

Recognizing the broader perspective of your work in the context of your organization helps you understand the objectives of your organization and what is expected of you and why.

Step 1B: Understand the Interrelationships

Reflect on how your role is interrelated to others’ roles in the broader context of your organization. If feasible, make a special effort to ascertain the contributions of your manager, his manager and his peers, your peers and your direct-reports. Ask, “How does your role fit into our organization? What are your goals and objectives? How does my work help you contribute in your role? How do you use my work? What can I do to help you and how? What product or service can I provide you to help you become more effective?”

Step 2: Identify What Your Role Requires of You

Given a thorough understanding of your organization’s objectives, establish what the demands of your role are. Stress on defining your key responsibilities and contributions by asking, “What do I need to do to meaningfully add value and contribute to the results of my organization?”

Step 3: Refine Your Role around Your Strengths

In principle, no job should be structured to suit the incumbent employee—every job should be task-focused and organized by function to ensure continuity and succession. However, to promote ownership and job satisfaction of the incumbent employee, her role should be customized to reflect her strengths and weaknesses to the extent possible, without compromising the core contributions expected of her role. This balance between job satisfaction and productive work is critical.

Once you have established what your role demands of you, understand how your unique strengths and characteristics can help your role be more effective for your organization. Ask, “What unique skills do I bring to this job? How can I channel my strengths to enhance this role?”

Step 4: Include How You Can Grow and Expand Your Role

Every job consists of tasks and activities. Managers and organizations often belatedly discover that, when the component tasks tend to be repetitive, an employee may no longer feel challenged and may therefore lose motivation on the job. Hence, all jobs should provide opportunities for the personal and professional growth of the employee and opportunities for the role to expand in terms of its responsibilities and contributions.

To identify how you can grow and expand on your job, ask, “What factors and trends will influence my organization in the short- and long-terms. How can my organization respond? What will be its next initiatives and goals? How will our roles change? How will these changes influence my role? What initiatives can I take to add more value to my job? What else can I do to contribute more? What skills can I acquire to be more effective?”

Preamble

This article is the first in a series of three articles that describes how to get clarity about your present role in your organization and write an effective job description.

Jobs and Job Descriptions

Jobs are the fundamental building blocks of an organization; they evolve to fulfill essential functions of the organization. The organizational endeavor is, therefore, the sum total of the endeavors of individuals at their jobs. It stands to reason that each job needs to be structured and formally defined. A job description serves this purpose: it is a formal detailing of the specific duties of an employee, her responsibilities and span of control.

A job exists to realize the purpose of an organization. For this reason, a job description should focus upward—it should be written primarily to reflect a specific need of the organization. In other words, a job description, for the most part, should describe the role and not the employee that holds the job—not what she can do, should do or wishes to do in her role.

Who Should Write Job Descriptions

Job descriptions help the management examine the structure of an organization and ensure that all the necessary responsibilities are adequately covered. Ideally, therefore, jobs should be defined from the top.

Theoretically, a manager is the most knowledgeable about all the jobs he supervises. He should be responsible for defining and maintaining the job description. However, hardly a few managers are keen on writing effective job descriptions for their employees. Most managers tend to be cursory: they use generic templates provided by their Human Resources or Personnel departments, or, at best, maintain a longwinded list of an employee’s activities. A majority of job descriptions are vague, out-of-date, indistinct and therefore inadequate. Consequently, job descriptions are often ignored in several organizations.

Why You Should Write Your Job Description

One of reasons you may be dissatisfied with your job or performing poorly on the job is that you tend to perform your day-to-day tasks without any formal detailing of your role. In all probability, you are not completely certain of everything your manager expects of you and how you will be measured against these expectations. In other words, a formal job description may not exist for your job, or, if it does exist, it is badly out-of-date, imprecise and inaccurate.

As the job-holder, you are the best person to write a job description for your job since you have the most on-the-ground knowledge of your role. This assumes, of course, that you can develop or have previously developed a sound understanding of what your role requires of you in the context of the objectives of your organization, including those of your supervisor and immediate management.

Additional critical reasons that may lead you to write your job description include,

• Redefinition: The nature of your role has changed due to redefinition of the nature of your business, restructuring, revisions to your organization’s objectives, or change in management or your supervisor-manager. Such changes may lead to a significant disparity between what you have done in the past and what may be expected of you in the new context.
• Transition: When you are moving out of your job, you may consider helping your management recruit a proficient replacement by defining the exact nature of your current role and the skill sets or credentials desirable in potential candidates. A separate blog article will discuss how to identify and define desired characteristics in job candidates.
• Measurement and Feedback: A job description can help setup a well-defined, consistent understanding of expectations and measures that form the bases of formal performance appraisals.
• Promotion or Compensation Review: An exhaustive job description is indispensable to persuade management to assign more resources or responsibilities to you or appraise your role, job title, compensation, or benefits.

Most significantly, you can use this opportunity to precisely define your role, correlate what you do with what is expected of you in your role, and ensure ownership and job satisfaction. This sense of better control and direction will translate to stronger motivation at work.