“So, I have a candidate that I hope is up to the job. But what I really want to know is, whether he has Stratum I, Stratum II or Stratum III capability. Can you conduct an interview and tell me?” Ellen asked.
“Not likely,” I replied. “But let’s suppose I could. What would that tell you?”
“Well, if he had Stratum III capability, that would be better than Stratum II?” she guessed.
“Would it?” I pressed.
Ellen’s brow furrowed, wondering if I had forgotten all my math skills. “Three is higher than two.”
“What does that matter?” I asked again. I waited, and then some. “In the end, does it matter whether this person is successful in the role?”
“Well, yes.” Ellen was a bit exasperated with me.
“When you define the role, is it important to define the level of work?”
“That’s what I have been trying to get to, the capability of the person to do the level of work, the level of work required by the role.”
“So, have you defined the level of work?”
“Yes, in the Role Description, we describe the activity and what this person will be responsible for.”
“But have you defined the level of work? What is the complexity of problems that must be solved, the decisions that must be made and the Time Span of the goals in the role?”
Ellen ran through the Role Description in her head. “Not specifically. The job title is Manager and this person will be responsible for everything that goes on in that department. But, we haven’t thought about specifically defining the level of work.”
“If you can do that, define the level of work, the complexity of problems to be solved and the decisions to be made, then, interview for that, you will be ahead of the game. And you will also be in a better position to judge the capability of the person related to the work. It’s all about the work.”
This idea of greater capacity and a higher level of complexity of mental processing being ‘better’ than another one is something I run into also. Perhaps it is in the way I explain it. We know that if someone has excess capacity ( they are too big for the bucket ) they will feel under-appreciated and possibly their manager, will feel threatened. I wonder how to explain it better?
How about illustrating it with an example? Take a person at Stratum 3, accustomed to doing strategic jobs like building “people systems” and improving the way that a company should be doing their work, and put them in the Stratum 1 role of a front line producer with a daily quota. The mismatch would be bad for both the employee and the company.
I do like your thoughts on the resulting behaviour, Michael. Imagine the chafe that would happen if you put the individual in my example in a supervisory role (Stratum 2). They would probably step on their own boss’s toes every day!
Maybe it’s more a matter of perspective and granularity, the front line producer works in the finest level of detail, where the Stratum 3 manager works in the broader space of tweaking the work systems themselves as a whole. I like the airplane analogy for this: looking at something from 30,000 feet vs. “being on the ground”.
thanks Kevin. Your response is helpful.