Talent management and the death of the rigid 'job description'

Game changers extend their influence broadly across your organisation and are likely to be worth many times their compensation packages to your business.

The truth is that high performing talent can be a high maintenance bunch! Our most talented people generally know their value and are increasingly demanding that it be recognised and rewarded. And this hasn't changed despite an economic recession that has put the power temporarily back in the hands of the employer, so this dynamic is probably here to stay.

But given compensation constraints (it has to be capped at some point), how do you keep your top people engaged and stimulated in a way that prevents them from looking elsewhere?

Movement and fluidity

If this is a question you are pondering then you may want to consider your views on job descriptions: the list of tasks or performance areas that make up a person's work responsibilities. If your view is that job descriptions are fixed and inflexible, you eliminate this as a tactical option to keep your key staff.

On the other hand, if your construct around what defines someone's job allows for movement and fluidity, it opens up other possibilities to create an extraordinary work experience for your most valuable human capital by keeping top talent challenged, fresh and always moving forward. (By the way, 'progress' was recently cited as the most highly valued characteristic of a job, based on a study of 12,000 people whose journal entries were tracked over a year.)

If this sounds like a simple and obvious statement of fact, don't be fooled - it's not.

Take a second now to think how you've set this up. If a job description document exists at all then your construct will largely be fixed: people have a set list of tasks against which they are appraised. If this is the case, then you'd benefit from shifting your thinking to see their jobs as a moving, dynamic collection of interesting projects that are continually responding to the business' needs - and, even better, to your needs as a senior business leader and a manager of many.

The secret is special projects.

And the key is constantly to keep an eye on the things that you need done, or looked into, or researched. That you would love to do yourself, but will probably not find the time or capacity to take on. If you feel they're important, then they are.
And if they're important then they're also likely to be interesting, complex, challenging and high profile: all the characteristics that smart people need to feel engaged and valued.

So be indulgent about what you need done, keep a list of these tasks, and farm them out liberally.

Examples might include:

• Researching a potential new market opportunity
  Driving new necessary innovation in a part of your business that's fallen off the pace
  
• Doing a cost/benefit study to inform a strategic decision
  
• Taking on an internal staff engagement project
  
• Re-engaging with an important customer who you've not been in touch with for a while
  
• Taking a young employee under their wing and turning around a negative behaviour pattern

The value for you is that you'll increase your reach and capacity significantly, so that alone makes it worth thinking this way.

In case you're wondering if this negates needing job descriptions at all - well, it doesn't. They are needed for stability and direction and for 70% of your top talent's time a job description is a good thing to have.

However, it's the other 30% that will make or break their career prospects, so just make sure you've got some wiggle room beyond the formal document.