Roles before jobs - towards the future of work
Steven Forth is co-founder and managing partner at Ibbaka. See his skill profile here.
Once upon a time most of us thought about our career in terms of a series of jobs. There are still many HR applications that organize work around jobs and job hierarchies. It is becoming clear that this is not how most of us work today and that job architectures will be replaced by more adaptive and resilient systems.
What will the key objects in these systems be if not jobs?
One possibility is roles. We all play multiple roles in our lives and play them in parallel. Our real work is not a set of stairs that we climb in an ordered manner. It is more like a braid of roles that overlap and reinforce each other.
This approach can lead to more resilient and adaptive organizations. Rather than organizing work through formal jobs which get locked up in complex job bands and reporting systems, one can take on and shed new roles as needed. And it is generally easier to pick up the skills needed for a role than to meet the more comprehensive requirements of a job.
In many of the job-competency models we have reviewed over the past few months the best practice has been to compose jobs from roles. Roles thus become the basic building blocks of work.
Roles have types of course. Here are some of the types we are seeing in our own work.
Job roles - the roles that jobs are composed of
Project roles - roles on a project
Ad-hoc roles - all those roles that you play that are not formally part of a job or project but that essential to the life of an organization
Community roles - for many people these are more important and fulfilling than what they do at work, and they are an important place to grow new skills
Family roles - these are at the centre of many people’s lives and form the warp across which other roles are woven
Personal roles - this may be extending the concept of role farther than is necessary, but many of us have things we work on across our life that give meaning and connection
Given the importance of roles, how should they be designed. There seem to be three basic approaches, each of which has its strengths.
Competency based
Each role requires a set of competencies. Older approaches to competency models often focussed on competencies and then behaviors. The advantages to this are that there are many canned competency models to leverage. On the other hand, few people outside of HR think of roles this way.
Task based
This approach is especially common for Project roles. In most projects there is a set of tasks and deliverables associated with each role. Mapping tasks, skills and roles can give a lot of insight into what is driving project performance and where skill gaps may exist.
Responsibility based
Roles have responsibilities. Rather than prescribe competencies, which can be too abstract, or tasks, which are often specific to a project or job, one can define a role using responsibilities. This approach comes from thinking about Family Roles, which are generally better understood as bundles of responsibilities than as a set of specific tasks.
Job - Role - Responsibilities
At Ibbaka we have adopted the Jobs, Roles, Responsibilities, Behaviours, Skills mode for our own competency model. We have included Jobs for hiring purposes. Most recruiters and job seekers are still thinking in terms of Jobs, even though in fact we are hiring people for a collection of roles. once you are inside Ibbaka, we think in terms of Roles and Responsibilities.
Let’s look at one role in our model. This is the role of Art Director.
The Art Director Role at Ibbaka
This role was designed by Gregory Ronczewski, the director of product design. Gregory himself plays multiple roles at Ibbaka and is one of two people with the skills to take on an Art Director (we have another person who is rapidly gaining the skills needed to take on this role).
The model includes one behavior …
“Balance competing priorities and and multiple projects while meeting deadlines.”
Of course a competency model is most alive at the level of skills.
There are 29 skills associated with the Art Director role, of which 16 are Must Have. Looking through these, one can see a good mix of Foundational (Red), Design (Light Blue), Business (Dark Blue), Social (Light Green) skills. It is worth noting that specific tools (Yellow Gold) have been pushed down to the Should Have level. This was a conscious design decision on Gregory’s part.
Ibbaka’s internal competency model is a work in progress. Right now we have twenty functional roles, each of which is being fleshed out by one of the people who is most engaged in the role. We will also be layering in a set of leadership roles over the next couple of weeks.
We are learning a lot by developing our internal competency model bottom up. Letting the people closest to the role design the role has made the whole model more concrete and relevant. We are also learning about each other and how we work together (important as we are all working from home at present). We will publish more about this process as, in the end, the process can be more important than the artifacts it creates.
