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Speaker A Sort of amazing. On one hand, once they get it, a manager can generally say, I want that output. In fact, I need to have that output correct. I can't negotiate that time period, but I can live with they can be very specific.
Speaker B Can I just clarify why I'm asking this question? Two layers behind this question is how we put this data into SAP and Oracle and workday as integrated ERP sets and run reliable reports from it. And that's a big challenge organization in.
Speaker A Order to do let's hold that too model, because I think that's we're going to talk about that in terms of implementation issues. Yeah, tomorrow. Okay. What we want to do now is talk about both a little bit about when do we start? We need a breakdown. No, we started at one. Okay, so we're good. Okay, we want to talk a little bit about just a refresher on work levels. Come at another little bit. We want to talk about the grouping of work because as we said earlier, the whole notion is that a structure is at the end of the day, it's about how you distribute accountability and authority into roles that are organized in groups and layers. So we want to stick with the layers a little bit more for a few minutes. A little bit of reminder around some of the principles that were involved here. And then just a quick little exercise looking at another piece of data that is available to you. Generally speaking, not always are the role descriptions of roles that you're looking at. Sometimes role descriptions themselves can tell you a little bit about level of work. So that's what we're going to do, and then Ron's going to take over and talk a little bit about grouping of work. So I presume that some of the basics that you recall this obviously wasn't in the material, I don't think, novus, but I think those of you have been steeped in it or those who haven't. This is a very core piece of in, broadly, really paraphrasing and simplifying is that Wilfred Brown believed that his organization was a system. He believed that an organization that he was managing like was a formal system in the world. He also believed scientifically that every system has some fundamental properties to it. And in very simple terms, he said, I want to know what the properties are of this system that cause work to be effective, work to be efficient. And that generates high levels of trust in the organization. Top to bottom, side to side. That's basically what he wanted to know. He had a little bit of a science bent in him. He was more than just a CEO. He was a serious intellectual individual. But he ran to this younger guy by the name of L. A. Jacks from the Tavistock Institute who he thought was pretty bright and could probably help him and say EJ, you can do whatever the hell you want at the tablock in the morning but I got a place for you over Mondays in the afternoons. And we're going to figure this organization out. And oh, by the way, even though it's a social system, we're going to use as many scientific principles as we can to be as sure as we can about what these properties are. So that's the task, I think, the very loose thing. So they started the work and as many of you maybe know, maybe some of you don't know is that what I always thought was really interesting about the work, number one was the fact it was commissioned by a CEO. It wasn't an academic exercise. This was a guy who just was curious, wanted to know about his system and wanted to study it. The second thing was that he didn't come up with a bunch of theories. It was more of going in and finding out what was going on and then extracting from that some of those fundamental properties that related to those three criteria that he was looking at. The other thing that I really thought was cool was they started at the shop floor instead of the boardroom. They went right down to where the real work was happening and these young men and these young men and women running these huge 2020 foot lays, making these very expensive, highly polished bearings distributed around the world, et cetera, et cetera. And so what they got into and they started talking about this stuff, things like a good science has definitions of terms. Everybody in a particular scientific field, when you use a term, everybody knows what the term means. So the first one they ran into was, geez Brown wants to know about work. Well, what's work? Well, the work I did today at work was really work. So the English language doesn't help us very much. Net of the story is after a lot of conversation, a lot of going back and forth, work is essentially a mental process. And that's what we've been talking about in terms of the time span of discretion. So that discretion, that judgment making, that decision making, that problem solving is each one of us using this brain power. So what we got is Wilfred Brown at the top of the organization and Joe Flitz at the lay thing. As human beings, they're doing the same thing every minute, every day. They're exercising their mental power to determine what needs to be done to get an issue solved or a product produced or something delivered in a targeted completion time. The difference is, as we know, the targeted completion time for Wilford Brown's law and the targeted completion time for producing a bearing is quite so. Therefore, the granting of that discretion is higher at the higher levels and are longer at the higher levels and shorter at the lower levels. So everybody clear on that one because that is basically the fundamental premise. What came out of that, of course, as we've seen is there's an example of the original work showed at the seven levels and that you have the operational levels, one, two, three. You've got sort of general management levels at four, five corporate strategic kinds of things at level six and seven. And then I think as all of us who've been in this world work for a while, when this was done, I think there's been some advances in complexity in the world and that there are some organizations out there that are probably more complex than seven. But certainly in a nation state like Canada, for example, in our work environment or our biggest opportunity environment, we don't find many level A organization. In fact, I can't think of one in Canada right now that starts in Canada. So that's the premise. The other way, and I think sometimes dealing with this relative to the time span issue is sometimes we show this one to clients a little bit because it helps people understand that it's not that Mr. CEO or Mr. Managing businesses at level six is spending all their time in a ten year to 20 year time frame. It just means that they have something that they need to be delivering on that nobody else is being asked to deliver on. Had a client that was we were trying to figure out whether the, whether the work was level six or seven. Actually it was a government agency determined that probably the level seven ish work was probably a collegium of the government, the ministers of the government and whatever, and they were kind of laying down that longer term thing. So we're trying to figure it out. One day his name was John came back and he said, it's a level six. I said, how do you know that? He said, I just got a 17 year tax. Oh really? And it turned out it was an organization that had a $5 billion unfunded liability. So he came back from his board, basically and said that money has to be zero in 17 years. He said, I ain't going to be here in 17 years. He says, but I guess I got to start right now exercising what I got to do up here to figure out how that's going to happen in 17 years, right? So he kind of got but the notion is with the rainbow is that everybody at every level has all of those differing paths. Like we have stuff that's the CEO's got stuff that's due next month or he's got stuff that he's got to do by next week, all that kind of stuff. But he's the only one that's really being accountable for the overall issue of managing that infrastructure and whatever that entails in terms of work that's assigned by the board. The issue we've got in organizations today, as many of you know, is that unfortunately, when you get to those top levels, requisite isn't that prevalent in the sense that colleague of mine, Mark Van Clee, where's Michael done a little research and found out that the best that he can find out there right now, unfortunately, is three years in terms of a really hard stated thing, which is really shocking and sad in some respects to think about. But that's a whole other topic. But you get the notion of that one. And these are just little quick descriptions of what's happening at each of the levels. In a very short sense. This next one, just to put it out there, is Elliot probably looking down, saying, paul, don't say this stuff because he would just stick very much to the very top box. And it just goes back to the notion we've been talking about. Time span is the measure, as any of us, in requisite, and I think it includes us up here. And many of our colleagues will not back off on the fact that that is in fact the existing measurement tool for relative complexity of roles in a hierarchical organization, full sum, so that we do our best to make sure that we can find that and actually go there. So that's why pushing back again on doing some time spent so you can get a better sense of that. There are some other things available and a lot of work has been done on getting some really clear and differentiated descriptions of work at each of these levels. So go back to what Jerry was saying. Management care about time spent. But if you can have a conversation with them about what's the nature of work you're required, what does it look like? What does it smell like? What does it taste like? And you can move up and down no, it's not that. Or you go down here and no, no, it's not that. It's this. Okay, you can get those conversations going. The other one is that we've also got some very good descriptions available to us now as a result of this work around what the cognitive processing of a human being looks like in terms of actual descriptors of what you can actually see someone being able to do. You can see their thinking process. It shows up in the way they speak, in the language that they speak. And Glenn can talk immensely to that subject, all right, but just observing and this is where it kind of connects to the pay because sometimes I get in clients and they say, well, gee, if we have that role there, they'll say, I need a grade nine to do that. And they're almost using a grading system as a proxy for some of the difference between what someone in grade nine can do versus someone to grade seven can do. So there's something so it's kind of interesting. So what it enables you to do is to have some really good conversations about that stuff. The Felt fair pay stuff is based on the longitudinal research that was done in Rimwick that maybe most of you are familiar with where they took people over an extended number of years and I think it was about 100 and to 125 people in the sample. And I forget how many years they did. It was close to 20, I think. And was it 20?
Speaker C It was nearly 200 people over 35 to 40 years.
Speaker A Was it that long?
Speaker C Wasn't called fair pay. It was the progression of their potential.
Speaker A But there was some stuff around the actual pay stuff that was done as.
Speaker B Well because I met two of these.
Speaker A Guys in Imperial oil charts were built on financial data. The progression chart handbook that developed the progression charts. They came out of the compensation net effect because what they were doing was basically touching base with these people. And what the guy told me is what they were doing was they're asking them basically just two questions in sort of a safe environment state, really test doing almost a leveling. At what level of work are you working at right now? Then the second question is.
Speaker B Do you.
Speaker A Feel that the compensation for that role is right on more than you should be paying or less than you should be paid? The net of it, they got out, they got the very high correlations of zero 89 to zero 91 correlations between what people said was self fair pay for the level of work complexity correlated. So that tells us something. And so essentially what it says what an organization is prepared to pay for something may have something to tell about the nature of the work and the capability of the individual they need in it.
Speaker D Just to add a piece, we've got a database of over 59,000 manager direct report relationships. We've done a number of different analyses.
Speaker A One of them, which was interesting, is.
Speaker D When we look at compensation, we stratified the straddle of compensation.
Speaker A We did a study, I forget how.
Speaker D Many people were involved in it came out of the database. And we found that people who were compensated at the appropriate stratum for the actual level of work they were doing were more satisfied than people who were being paid less for that stratum of work. But interestingly also for people who were being paid more than that stratum of work.
Speaker A Yeah, interesting. Yeah. So dissatisfaction even by so they feel guilty. Yeah, you talk to them, they feel guilty. Well, that's why the term Elliot used to argue that people have a felt fair sense. So fairness, you know, like they just.
Speaker D Sense what's fair, what's not fair.
Speaker A Human beings have the capacity to do that. So anyway, so all we're saying in this is that we're really advocating and that's why we spent the time on the time span and stuff just to get at it. Because if you really haven't done that, you haven't done our own. But just recognize that there's some other things available to you, real calibrating if you're unsure. And it's kind of like what's the old thing? So if you can get kind of three or four points on this thing, kind of calibrating with each other, then you've got a reasonable proposition to put forward, like Jerry would say to put forward demanded reading is looking like this, guys, what do you think? And they can generally give you the answer very quickly.
Speaker B What if there is a conflict between everything else and the time span? So the time span is six months, but every other.
Speaker A Then you have a conversation to engage a little bit. Going back to the interview there too. Well, what is the time frame you really want me to work in? And there's an opportunity because one of the things that this work does, at least in my thing, is it frees people up. I mean, in organizations, there's generally speaking, a lot of compression. By and large, when you first walk in. I know Ron statistics and our anecdotal statistics line up with each other in the sense that when you walk into most in our case, we took a bunch of level five organizations over ten years that we've been doing the work. And here's what it was when we entered. And what we found basically is that something like roughly 38% of the roles in the organization were jammed up and 18% were gapped. So you got over 50% of the organizations that in a non requisite scenario. What it gives you is an opportunity to say, where have you got some of that? And where can you do some of that? Flattening out? In the organization or creating to make sure that there's not that compression and you can give people more space, actually, to get stuff done. But I don't think it doesn't give you an automatic answer, it gives you a problem. There's a disconnect between that, but it's the client who's accountable for figuring that out. At the end of the day, here's the data that we've got. What do you think it needs to be? And turn the accountability for making those decisions over to the client.
Speaker B But in terms of assessing what it is, do you say that it's level two because of the time span or do you give it a higher yeah.
Speaker A We would probably air back on the time span. In other words. And we'll see the external camps tomorrow and how they're drawn from the perspective of the manager because time span is in the mind of the manager. All right, so if we interview the manager and the subordinate all right, sometime, and you'll see that tomorrow, there'll be little arrows on the chart in terms of what's that is a disconnect between what the manager has leveled the role at and what the subordinate says it is. Either it's higher or lower in terms of their experience of it. But that just opens up again the conversation that management needs to have relative to the requisite organization, where do they want to place it and need to place it for all the good business reasons and to correct that disconnect, if you will. Between the work we're asking for someone and the kind of tasking that we're.
Speaker C Doing, my default assumption is we got the time sam wrong. And I remember when Ellie and I were doing a big project before we went back three times to interview the director of long range planning and his boss. Three times we went back before we were able to really get at what it was that was the true time span defining function. If the other three boxes point to it being level three and you get a six month time span, I'm going to go back and kick that time span again and again and again. Because in this case it looks like, talks like and acts like a doctor, it just doesn't have depth written on it. That's my default.
Speaker A And that gets back into Jerry's issue around because sometimes you don't have the budget to go back time again.
Speaker D If I could just add to that part of the value of doing the assessment is find out what the issues are. Inevitably when you go in and get all this information, you find all kinds of problems. So they're not something to be avoided, they're quite natural. A fairly common one that we found. And it's interesting, you've got this financial.
Speaker A Situation.
Speaker D We'Ve got this data now in.
Speaker A All kinds of roles.
Speaker D The single worst role we found in an organization is an analyst. Because an analyst can be stratum one.
Speaker A In terms of proceduralized stuff, or it.
Speaker D Can be stratum two in terms of diagnostic stuff. We found that's the single worst role in terms of clarity of level, what you'll sometimes find is someone will say for a particular role, say an analyst role, they'll say, well, the time span.
Speaker A Is a month, I have to do.
Speaker D This work and have an output every month. And you sort of look at it and you look at the context and the background of these folks and then you say, well, what about this person? Do they need a diagnostic capability to figure stuff out or can they just do it in a more proceduralized way? And they say, well, no, it has to be done in a diagnostic way, we're not giving them the procedures to use. So you've got an inherent conflict between what the time span is and the information processing requirements. And as Jerry said, then you need to do more digging in terms of well, why is this and how can it be changed? Because if there is this discrepancy, it is already causing problems and if we don't do something about it, it will continue to cause problems.
Speaker C Rolling accountability that you come up with where the real time? It's a six month rolling accountability to put forth the five year plan, but you have to dig deeply.
Speaker A And again, remember, we're still in the diagnostic phase of this Brussels in terms of uncovering what appears to be this current state of the nation. It's a diagnostic. This is what we think. Then we're going to get into the whole issue of what do we propose to do with that? There's a whole other different exercise just.
Speaker E For a quick clarification on the slide. That was the rainbow you've had, for example, managers of managers, and I assume, based on my reading and the little bit of knowledge that I have, that you could have individual contributors at that level oh, sure. That are not managers.
Speaker A No, this is just Descripting the managing. Theoretically, you could have a specialist almost at every level except seven, probably. And there's always a question in our organizational work anyway, is a lack of appreciation for the notion of the complexity of individual contributor work. In other words, a lot of individual contributor work tends to get not all some individual contributor work gets placed too low in the hierarchy, often because HR systems and stuff don't allow for a title like that at level, don't allow compensation at that level. And so you try to scose people down into a structure.
Speaker F So there's a lot of interesting work that's been going on, I think for a long time, but it's becoming more automated and computerized in the sense of not just assessing people's cognitive ability, but doing psychological examination of personality. And is this type of person actually ideal for the work?
Speaker A Can we hang on to that till tomorrow? Steven, take a whole issue of a whole section on fit to Wall, which is now looking at the whole capability part of it. This is just assessing the work and the level of work, not the people.
Speaker F Yeah, but I mean but you also think there's a flip side of it, right, as you define that what the work is. It kind of sets the standards for the people, right?
Speaker A Oh, for sure. That's why you want to do it. You want to understand what is the work today and then make some propositions about relative to your strategy, blah, blah, blah, what's the work tomorrow? And then what kind of capability mapping do you need to do around that to make sure that you got people that are fit to roll, in other words. So tomorrow we're going to talk about that whole subject of getting people to work, which is one one how do you define manage in this chart? I don't like we say we don't have a definition for management. Well, it's an employee who is accountable for the outputs of others, for exercising leadership, for continuous improvement of processes used by subordinates and building a team of increasingly capable well, you said manager. I said we didn't use the term manager. That's a verb. Manager.
Speaker E I have.
Speaker A The use of the term manage implies if you're a staff person.
Speaker B Where do you fall?
Speaker A You don't. And that's right. I see that this is what you're talking about, the managerial leadership structure, which is people who are managing others. But I could be a senior staff person. I don't even have this chart and another chart I don't have. Can I get both charts? Yes, you can. Okay.
Speaker G This is question.
Speaker E The relationship kind of variables that you want to delve into other than just your content questions. Yeah.
Speaker A So that's part of what I was doing to differentiate three from four, which was to say at three, they need to be able to do A leads to B leads to C. Yeah.
Speaker E But you weren't getting into the cognitive.
Speaker A Again. Remember, we said in our diagnosis focus, at least our firm focus is we're not there to assess in this diagnostic phase, we're not there to assess anything about the capability to do well.
Speaker E I'm not talking about capabilities, but when you're starting to this works for me because I think times ten oversuits when you might have a very complex operation that takes a lot of cognitive rationale work, and you have to build relationships with other lines of the business. And you've got artificial time frames because we're in a just in time society now, and they're going to give you six months, even though it's a very complex task. You see that a lot in businesses now, or three months. But what works for me is if we tie those together in our questioning. So we're not just focusing on the time frame, but also taking in consideration the cognitive thinking and ethical problem solving as well as relationship building, that we combine that. And you weren't asking as many questions about what are the problems, what are the issues I'm trying to resolve down into more the cognitive side. When we were doing that interview, that's where I'm wondering if you have.
Speaker A Lynette says the required level of mental processing. Right. That is what I was addressing. They have to be able to do serial processing. Do they have to be able to do parallel processing? And then on this one, I was.
Speaker E Thinking more complex in terms of how big the problems are that you're trying to resolve.
Speaker A Well, remember one other thing. Remember that word that you were careful looked after is that we do not know how to measure the complexity of a task. This measurement tool is relative complexity of roles, but not tasks. So, for example, the CEO role is a more complex role than Joe Flitz on the front line. But Joe Flitz is doing some complex tasks. The CEO could no more do the flight of the I think most of us do collect a lot of information about the nature of the work in the diagnostic. In other words, we're interviewing people about what their work is, what their accountability, how they carry out that work, what are some of the important role relationships they have to manage what's the decision authorities that they have. So that composite of that data kind of gives you a pretty good sense. And then what we're going to do right now is take a look. Very often there's a role description available to us, too, and that's another set of information to help us get a little bit of a sense of where the level of so let's move on to the exercise, I guess. Let's do the one more burning question. Paul, do we have a copy of that slide? No, you don't, because I threw them in at the last minute. But we'll make sure that you kept sorry. Thanks. No, it was the earlier one. The other two I just threw in this afternoon because I thought it might be useful. Looks like it was kind of raised a few good questions, so maybe it was useful. Okay, what we'd like you to do now is to in your groups. If you go into your binder, the little blue section under day one, it'll be day one, section four, there should be just some really little simple level descriptions, level 1234, whatever. And then behind that, there are role descriptions. There's four of them. Four of them. Make sure that you can find where they are. One is for a technical services role. One is for an operations role. The third one is for a special project role. And the fourth one is for human resources. What we'd like you to do, all right, is to using whatever tools you want. We'd like you to work in your groups to determine first of all, I'd like day one, section four. Behind the blue sheet, it says section four. You guys had, like, everybody the HR one. You had technical services, I believe so. Give me your technical services. Since where did you come out in terms of level of work? I did. Where did you come out on technical services?
Speaker G We said it was a two.
Speaker A You said level two. Any particular reason why you said level two? Hello.
Speaker G The purpose of the role is to provide technical expertise to the shop floor. And if we look at the various tasks within the role, you'll notice that there are a number of verbs that say manage and are about improving.
Speaker A You said level two.
Speaker E Yes.
Speaker A What about the HR one? Where did you come out on the HR one four? We were heads in between the reasons.
Speaker B Why.
Speaker A One of the issues was whether it was a separate company or a division within a larger company that might have central HR doing that was at.
Speaker B Least part of the debate.
Speaker A Yeah, you don't know that from look feel for any particular things that still out that that would were reading out from the page that said three to five year time span may not be the longest task, but there's a time span noted in that particular description.
Speaker B Interaction with senior management.
Speaker A Interaction with senior management. So some potential relationship.
Speaker B Well, that means level four of the.
Speaker A Bumper tools across function, and level four is what requires you to work functionally. Okay. Real cool.
Speaker G It's also about changing the culture, integrating better culture into the culture.
Speaker A Yeah. Which would have some certainly some issues around the targeted completion time to get something like that done. It's not going to happen overnight. We all know that. Okay, let's move over here. Thanks, guys. So you guys had HR and operations. Let's do the operations one first. Let's do the angel one first.
Speaker B Operations. Because I think our debate was, given what's there, it's very difficult with some of where they say develop flexible manufacturing strategy, and we haven't been able to do any kind of understanding of what they mean by that.
Speaker A You're just going from a piece of paper.
Speaker B Implement five s strategy, et cetera. So when you look at those, you don't know for sure how much structure there is there already on the time frame. So it could be level three, but it could be level three.
Speaker A But what's your sense? Just reading the feature wherever put it twos. Now.
Speaker B We have.
Speaker A Just a reasoning. My reasoning was it's based on budget improving work quality, schedule constraint. That was too bad. Okay, so you were all busy.
Speaker B Nicky's not stepping up.
Speaker A All right, so we got a very science, right? You guys had develop a lift. Oh, I'm sorry, HR. Where did you place HR 4485? Was there any particular reason for the action? Hey, guys, I mean, do we need to quit and break or what? We're not listening. Well, it's good, but I like people to have an opportunity. So four, was there a particular reason.
Speaker B Why we did it at a three high, four low? We went quite technically into that one quite a while, and we felt that the role is written across two levels in that manner. Pushed it slightly, but some things appeared in.
Speaker A So you kind of had a three four on that one. Yeah. Boy, a really decisive group there. Do you have trouble making decisions? Sometimes. What did I give you guys besides the HR? Went ahead. All right, where did you kind of come out on those special projects? Actually, three or four?
Speaker B I mean, it depends on several questions.
Speaker A What's the level of the CIO? What's the level of the project owner that they're interface? Taking that out of it, just looking at the words on the paper, probably.
Speaker E Three.
Speaker A Somewhere in the three range. And the HR three plus four.
Speaker C Piece.
Speaker A Of data that you might receive. And we're asking to take a look at it to give your best sense of what's written. If it's a balance of three four, that's fine, too. But it's telling you that it's not clear. This is a real role description. The role description that's the data analyst that says the data would say that it's really not clear. So going forward, if you want to have that role. You got to decide at what level it's going to be. And ideally, you want a role mapping and a role scripture that's going to match that. It's going to have a language in it that's going to describe at that level whatever level you choose to place it at. Well, because of time.
Speaker E Okay, no.
Speaker A You guys have operations as well.
Speaker F We felt that come up with a clear, we definitely ruled out.
Speaker A How many plants does he have?
Speaker B So it was too ambiguous.
Speaker A We know it's more than one. We think it's more, we know it's more than one. Suggest that we have some guidelines, got some actual guides for writing a role description level 123456. So the language in those role descriptive guides is intended to have a little more of a flavor for the nature of the work and a little bit of the touch on the thinking process that would be required at that level to connect. Because looking at more mixture of description, well, as I think a lot of you run into it, we certainly run into it, is that for the most part in organizations relative to the requisite principles, most role descriptions really are not very good. They're more like activity lists. It's very difficult to eke out what the outputs of the role are. Very difficult in most cases. And the fundamental notion of roles, as we said earlier, roles exist to deliver some degree, some outputs. So what are the outputs? They should at least be specific responsibly, because some of those outputs are outputs that are of a longer term nature relative to the time span of the wall. And then within that, then performance contracts performed around those kind of outputs on an annual basis. Anyway, for the sake of the case, what we did was we tried to write the technical services one as a high two role, we tried to write the operations one as a mid to high three role. We tried to write the special projects as a mid to high three role, and we put the high rate unit as one, as a low four. So that was just kind of how we put it together as a case group in terms of what we can. But as you can see, we've got some pretty good approximations. So again, don't just have the question that the role description itself, if you're looking at that kind of data in your diagnosis, it's just raising more questions that this is not aligned with what people may think going forward. One of the things you're going to have to say to your clients, I think, is you may want to seriously consider about getting a much greater alignment with how you describe roles in the form of system and how you're intending to operate them.