Jobs and Individuals: Chicken Or Egg?

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...not everyone’s ‘favourite person’, the Board was inclined to accept a letter of resignation, and almost did. Nevertheless, Lou was given the opportunity to pitch for a key anchor-job in the new organisation, after independent assessment, and is now a very successful Board member.

- Mel was also a highly regarded middle-manager with high aspirations and was expected by all to fill the very next promotional slot. But when the offer of promotion came, to everyone’s surprise it was rejected. Mel felt that the other new appointments were too subjective, ill-judged and unworkable, and quickly...

...found a much better job elsewhere. In the exit interview, Mel said that even a sideways move within the organisation would have been acceptable in the short-term to gain wider work-experience, but not enhanced responsibility with what Mel felt were wrongly-promoted work colleagues.

Some Conclusions

The key conclusion is that more often than not, the candidate must fit the job - not the other way around! It can be very appealing to mould a job around an internal candidate, but at best this is often only a short-term solution.

If you try to shape new jobs significantly around your current employees as available, you may keep some of them happy for a while, but in doing so, you might not only disappoint many others, you may well not meet your organisation’s longer-term objectives.

Moreover, not all the ‘obvious’ candidates will be the best for a new post, nor will the less obvious ones necessarily be inappropriate.

Tools to Help You

There is no useful short cut to understanding better either what qualities and skills you will need from a new post, nor the potential of your existing staff. And this takes rigorous and objective analysis.

Good practice will include:
- writing a clear Job Description for... continued on page six >

 

 

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