Designing High-Performance Jobs

The July-August issue of the Harvard Business Review carries a great article by Robert Simons: Designing High-Performance Jobs. (You may remember Robert Simons as the guy of the Levers of Control.) The idea of the article is really simple.

"For your business to achieve its potential, each employee's supply of organizational resources should equal his or her demand for them, and the same supply-and-demand balance must apply to every function, every business unit, and the entire company."

To understand the supply-and-demand perspective of a high-performance job, Simons suggests the need to know the four spans of job design, and how to apply them to a particular job to be successful. These spans of job design can be used as levers, to be moved in order to generate the desired result. There isn't a correct setting, as it all depends on what the required outcome is and the culture of the organization. To apply the spans, you really have to know your organization, and know what you're trying to accomplish. The spans of job design are described as follows:

1. The Span of Control defines the range of resources that an employee has control and accountability over.
2. The Span of Accountability defines the range of factors influencing the measures of an employee's performance. If you measure narrowly, you're holding an employee accountability for complying with directives, while a wide measure encourages creativity and risk taking.
3. The Span of Influence defines the sphere the employee will operate under in seeking information and influencing the work of others, to achieve their objectives. This span can be widen to encourage out-of-the-box thinking -- or narrowed to focus on the adherence of well defined processes.
4. The Span of Support defines the extent to which an employee can expect support from outside their organizational unit. This span can be adjusted based on how much an organization shares a common focus on an objective, such as customer service.

Achieving the right balance for a job is of course the difficult task. The spans of job design is only a tool; how you use it is a different story. Simons offers some guidance in the article. The supply side of the equation is governed by the spans of control and support -- where control is hard, and support, soft. On the other side, demand is governed by the spans of accountability -- hard -- and influence -- soft. To achieve high-performance jobs, the supply and demand sides must balance. Simons also suggest that you can use this equation as a simple test to see if there is balance within a job -- or if a job is simply destined for failure based on its design. Failure usually comes as a result of imbalance, manifesting itself either in a problem with resources, control or red tape.

Simons' article is a great read, and thought provoking. His ideas can be applied to organizations or individuals -- and provides a great tool for thinking your way through job design or evaluating your state in an organizational dystopia.