Roles, Jobs and a little Holacracy

If you want to have more flexibility, to offer more variety and to be less dependent of one or two “heroes”, then it’s important to have a learning mechanism in place in your company. If learning is an integral part of daily practice this will make your business, and all individuals in it, grow. In next week’s video (episode 13), I will discuss a great way to teach and learn at work. Be sure to watch that episode as soon as it’s published.

But first, you need to do something else to create a sound basis for learning. I advise you to identify Job Roles instead of Jobs. This allows your business to improve continuously, and it will give you all sorts of new opportunities. Job Titles and Job Descriptions are too limited. When you identify job roles, you can offer every individual within your company a custom made program. Job roles are small collections of tasks that belong together in a natural way. One person can fill many roles. And when you have a good learning program in place, the number of potential roles per person will grow.

Since 1997, I’ve on and off been able to implement this way of working. The results are awesome. You can find a comparable approach in the Holacracy model; developed by Brian Robertson. It’s a system of organizational governance that becomes quite popular these days. It’s a model that’s worthwhile to look at. You can find more information here and here.

What working with roles is all about is to stop putting people in boxes. In all my experience as a leader, I’ve found it difficult to see that not only the system and management are stuck, employees also have become so much used to the system that they have a hard time when you offer them the opportunity to think and work beyond a job title or job description. I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie “The Matrix”, but sometimes it just felt as if I had to unplug people from the Matrix and show them the real world.

Wake up; there’s a world pulled over your eyes that you need to let go. Don’t be afraid; it’s not like you’re going to get hurt. Far from it.

Thanks for watching this week’s video!

Be Smart and see you on the next one.