The best interview process in the world is pointless if the experience in the organization isn’t equally great. It’s in the company’s and the employee’s best interests for the employee to be able to tackle needed tasks and not be held back by a job description. I’ve talked about the siloing effect of job descriptions, and the reason job descriptions exist at all. This article focuses on how to structure your teams so they’re more effective, more collaborative and produce better results.
Job titles
If I want a team of people who all work together, develop overlapping skills and grow as a team, silos get in the way. Therefore, reducing silos is necessary in order to get what I want. It starts with job titles.
There are two times when a title is beneficial to an employee or the company. The first is when the employee is entering or leaving the company — they look for jobs similar to the titles they expect to find. As an employer, I want to meet people where they are, so I use titles in hiring. The second time is when an employee is meeting somebody from outside the company who needs to understand their role quickly. The interesting thing here is that anybody who has the expected skills can claim the expected title and work with an external person.
The way I approach it, therefore, is this: there is only one job title in any given area. I work in tech, so it’s usually “Developer” or “Engineer,” but anything that resonates with the team will do. The important thing is that there’s only one. That job title can have different levels to indicate growth and competence, but it doesn’t need many.
When titles matter
- External visitor: When somebody external comes to see us, whoever sees them tells them the title they’re expected to have, whether it’s senior developer, principal engineer, CTO, lead tester, etc. It doesn’t matter as long as the title sets the right expectations with the external person; nobody minds.
- Employees leaving: I always tell employees that I expect them to leave the company someday. As long as our paths are aligned, we can travel together, but someday, they’re likely to want something different. When they do, I want to support them in getting it. I tell all my employees that when they apply for a new role, they can use whatever job title they want in order to get it. Just be sure to tell me what title they used so I can confirm that title if they use me as a reference. Being open this way prevents any anxiety an employee may feel about their job title (i.e., engineer) not matching the jobs they’re applying for (i.e., lead tester).
Having only a single job title forces job descriptions to change. No longer can they be what train-wreck management says they should be (a way to allocate blame). Instead, they have to become something new. When an entire team or an entire department only has a single job title, the job description becomes more vague. It becomes a way to unite people on purpose rather than divide them into responsibilities. Being united makes it easier for people to cross-skill in areas they’re interested in but have never had a chance to learn before, which improves the bus factor. It makes it easier to work together, and to improve flow. No longer does work get stuck in the Testing phase, which can only be done by a single Tester. Getting work through the system is the team’s responsibility, and if something is stuck, everybody works to get it unstuck.
The power of flexible job descriptions
Having more flexible job descriptions changes how people progress. Since there’s no tightly defined box to fit somebody in, there have to be other ways for people to know they’re progressing. I’m fond of a path that acknowledges that generalization and specialization are equally valid ways to progress and that continues to reward technical growth for those who don’t want to become managers. I don’t want a proliferation of vertical levels, either. I want to keep the number down to something reasonable — say four to five, tops. We’ll define them as follows:
- Junior — not yet competent in any critical skills required for their role
- Intermediate — competent in 1 essential skill needed for their role
- Senior — mastery of 1 crucial skill necessary for their role
- Generalist — competent in 5–7 essential skills required for the role
- Principal/staff/guru — mastery of 3+ crucial skills as are necessary for the role
Having a small number of levels creates a new potential problem — people who learn a lot and who grow a lot want their pay to reflect that. Too right, they do. This can present something of a dilemma. I only ever hire somebody into a junior role if I know I can support their growth to an intermediate role in 3–6 months. If I don’t have the infrastructure to do that, hiring junior people will just create overheads that will harm the team.
The move from junior to intermediate comes with a significant pay bump, so everything runs smoothly. But how does progress work for intermediates? This is where things get interesting. For most people, for most of their career, they will be intermediate, according to this scale. Finding people who have mastery of a key skill is really hard. That means that both senior and guru levels are exceedingly rare. When they do happen, they should see a significant salary increase. But most people will spend most of their career at the intermediate level. So, in order to keep people happy, they need to have continual progress that recognizes the growth in their skills. Here is another place to step away from the orthodoxy.
Career progression
Anybody who has spent time reading my material knows that I attribute significant influence to the system in which people operate. The vast majority of variation in performance is down to the system rather than the individual. That means that everybody in the team will make progress that falls within a specific boundary, as enabled by the system (there are exceptions for outliers, but outliers tend to be easy to spot at either end of the spectrum). In other words, most people’s progress is enabled or constrained by things the individual has little to no control over. Therefore, individual assessments and individual raises make no sense at all. But what replaces it?
The replacement is simple (that’s not to say easy). Every year, every employee moves up on a pay scale that’s determined by their starting salary combined with their years with the organization, normalized with what the market is saying. That is to say, regardless of what’s happening in the organization, if raises are going to one person, they should be going to everybody in that role. The raises should be significant enough that people don’t compare themselves to the market and find it lacking. (Interestingly, after adopting this process, I never have any qualms about sharing salary information publicly.)
Job descriptions that have less detail create space for subjectivity in promotions and raises. I can hear some of you saying, ‘But shouldn’t promotions be objective and based on data?’ To that, I say, you’re creating an impossible task. Assessments of people’s growth and development are always subjective. The best we ever manage is to create an illusion of objectivity. But anybody who has ever ticked every box for promotion and still found that they aren’t promoted will know that promotions are still based on people’s judgment. All this does is get rid of the illusion, forcing genuine conversations with employees who want to know what it takes to get to the next level.
By this point, I expect a number of you to be nervous about all this change. I encourage you to take these ideas to your HR folks. When brought to them in the spirit of consultation, HR gets very excited. After all, every additional job title is another set of requirements and metrics they have to track and monitor. Consolidation reduces their workload significantly while also allowing flexibility in progress. Standard pay scales also resolve gender pay gaps and other historical inequities.
The last part of the puzzle for now is that of growth. If salaries grow annually because that’s what the system enables, how does feedback work? It’s usually part of the annual appraisal process. You may be surprised by what I’m about to say (probably not), but yearly appraisals are the worst. Feedback doesn’t work on an annual timeframe. It doesn’t work when it’s anonymous or given by the wrong person. Effective feedback is timely. Which means doing it annually can never really work. One wonders why we keep doing it.
Feedback needs to be continual. Not as something given by me, who has power, to an employee, who does not. But by people who work together to solve problems and grow.
Building this sort of culture is worth its weight in gold. It’s so far removed from what people tend to experience and yet crave desperately that, at first, they have trouble accepting it, and eventually, they can’t get enough of it. In the places where I’ve done it, the result is an increase in collective consciousness and team cohesion. Watching the reality sink in is like watching plants grow out of the soil after a heavy rain in a desert. There’s nothing else like it.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
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