I heard back from Michelle Malay Carter last week about a post we highlighted last week on Time Span. In her response, she posed this dilemma.
“We find that managers, even when they believe the concept is credible, struggle to articulate tasks in Time Span.”
I find the biggest difficulty in understanding Time Span is over-thinking it. Most managers make it way too difficult.
Time Span is simple. It is the Time part of every goal. A goal is a “What, By When?” That’s it. Time Span is the “By When” part. Michelle was correct. Most managers focus on the “What” part of the goal. The “By When” part is often an afterthought. But it is the “By When” that we need to pay attention to. It establishes accountability and calibrates the complexity of the goal.
When you think of the Time Span of any task assignment, just think about the goal, the “What, By When?” and you will have it.
Hi Tom,
Thanks for the mention. To put more meat on the bone of that comment, what I see is managers are able to look at a description of the nature of each work level and state what level they believe a role falls within, and their description sounds legitimate to me. However, when we try to align that with time span by asking them to articulate a longest task (a what by when), the length of the time span does not align with the described level of work. (Time span plots the role in a lower work level.)
For example, I often have managers say, this is level two work because I am not fully specifying the output upfront. They have to add pieces together to draw a conclusion and to do the work. (This is a description of the nature of Level 2 work which has a time span between 3 and 12 months.)
However, when I ask them to articulate the tasks in the role, often, they cannot come up with anything longer than 3 months. i.e. complete this transaction, etc. If they cannot communicate the broader goal to me, this means that they are not clearly articulating level 2 expectations to their employees as well.
With probing (and spoon feeding), we then find that the real expectation for many level 2 independent contributor roles is to a build a network of relationships over time with customers, with vendors, etc. This task then gets us into level two time spans (3 – 12 months).
This says to me that organizations, in general, don’t do an adequate job of scoping (or simply communicating) the strategic intent of roles. My experience is that organization design is happening by default, not intent.
What has your experience been?
Regards,
Michelle