Again, the nemesis of good job design is complexity. Complexity has a bad habit of creeping into your systems and jobs over time, as you respond to dynamic market conditions and chase new sources of revenue. You may have tamed complexity five years ago with roles and responsibilities that matched your world of five years ago and your employees of five years ago. But the threat requires constant vigilance. What matters is whether your current job designs match the people who are doing them right now.

1. Close the Gap

When a company identifies a gap between its people and the jobs they're doing, it essentially has two choices: reduce operational complexity or increase employee sophistication. Said differently, change the people or change the job. On the people side, the two levers you have are selection and training. Selection might work in a high-turnover business, but it's usually a daunting solution for any other organization…

The goal is to get a closer match between employee sophistication and operational complexity. Go as far as you can on the people front, and then address system complexity. You can address complexity either by decreasing it outright or by decreasing the amount of complexity experienced by each employee. For the latter, it may be possible to more thoughtfully break up who does what — break down a Job into smaller tasks and assign them to specialized employees. Take inspiration from a hospital: one person takes blood pressure, another does anesthesia, and another performs the surgery. The system itself is complicated, but each employee only experiences a portion of it.

Again, the nemesis of good job design is complexity. Complexity has a bad habit of creeping into your systems and jobs over time, as you respond to dynamic market conditions and chase new sources of revenue. You may have tamed complexity five years ago with roles and responsibilities that matched your world of five years ago and your employees of five years ago. But the threat requires constant vigilance. What matters is whether your current job designs match the people who are doing them right now.

1. Chart Complexity overTime

(Estimated Time: Fifteen Minutes)

Once you have some intuition from going undercover, try to graphically plot how the operational complexity experienced by your employees has changed over the past five years (this can be done for any job). Then plot the change in employee sophistication over the same time span. If your graph looks something like figure 3-2, then you have a problem.

1. Close the Gap

When a company identifies a gap between its people and the jobs they're doing, it essentially has two choices: reduce operational complexity or increase employee sophistication. Said differently, change the people or change the job. On the people side, the two levers you have are selection and training. Selection might work in a high-turnover business, but it's usually a daunting solution for any other organization…

The goal is to get a closer match between employee sophistication and operational complexity. Go as far as you can on the people front, and then address system complexity. You can address complexity either by decreasing it outright or by decreasing the amount of complexity experienced by each employee. For the latter, it may be possible to more thoughtfully break up who does what — break down a Job into smaller tasks and assign them to specialized employees. Take inspiration from a hospital: one person takes blood pressure, another does anesthesia, and another performs the surgery. The system itself is complicated, but each employee only experiences a portion of it.