Beyond the Job Description

Jesse Sostrin: Yes, your introduction was fantastic and you set it up nicely. It's this brutal reality that we confront, sometimes on day one and sometimes after several weeks on the job, when we realize that that interview we had and the job description we were presented with, and the tasks and activities that were outlined for us are only part of the picture. So I think of it as the myth of your working life. When you accept that superficial description of what your job is and what your role is, when in reality there are all those hidden demands on our time, those important priorities that were left unsaid that we're left to figure out for ourselves what matters, and all of the hidden challenges that come along with getting great work done.

Rachel Salaman: And you call this the hidden curriculum of work in the book. Why is it so important to understand one's own hidden curriculum of work?

Jesse Sostrin: Well, I think the reality of the impact is what drives us to understand it. It literally reduces our ability to focus on the priorities at hand, to anticipate what needs to get done in order for some of the collaboration and some of the communication that has to happen with other people, and when it comes down the bottom line we don't work as well, we don't produce results for our team and for our organization that we need to, and it hurts our chances to succeed in our careers. So, a hidden curriculum is important because half of it is visible, and that's the part, for example, the job description that we all can point to and say look, here's my title, here's my business card, here's what I do for this organization, but that other half that's hidden is often un-discussed, and that makes it even more important to try to identify it and make it discussable. As you mentioned in your introduction, whether it's that surprise budget reduction, whether it's those unspoken expectations amongst senior leaders which may also conflict with other expectations, or whether it's that difficult colleague that you were blind-sided by, either are critical opportunities for us to identify the areas of possible pitfalls that we can get out in front of, and actually to perform around them.

Rachel Salaman: And you say that most people react adversely to the hidden curriculum of work, and that this can lead to disengagement, which is quite a common modern problem. How common is it in your experience?

Jesse Sostrin: Well, as you know the disengagement epidemic is at a fever pitch right now, there are consultants and senior organizational leaders lining up to call this the biggest problem we've ever faced in the world of work. When 71% of your workforce in the United States is actively or passively disengaged, then it costs the economy roughly $350 billion a year in productivity. It certainly looks like it's the problem, but I have a different take. I really don't think employee engagement is the issue, I think that's an outcome of something that's happening, and I trace it back to the effects of the hidden curriculum of work, and what I see most common are some approaches or responses to that, that just don't produce the kind of positive effect that you need. So, burying your head in the sand is usually not a good idea, but unfortunately when people don't have the tools, that's a likely response. Most common, however, is the sort of brute force problem solving where people identify a challenge and they say, "Well, I've just got to move through that, I have to find a way," and they don't take the time to necessarily get below the surface to see what are some of the root causes and conditions that might fuel and sustain this particular challenge. And when that happens, you end up wasting more time because you've solved the superficial parts of the problem without actually getting down to the structural systemic changes that you need to make to shift the conditions that keep that problem in place. And the third approach is when I recall the cavalry call, where you bring in a consultant or somebody internally in human resources or a senior manager, but what happens there is you actually bring in outside expertise and you fail to actually equip the people most involved who are the stakeholders and actually learning and developing through the challenge, and so you supplant their ability to actually learn and grow from it. So, those three response patterns just aren't effective enough, we need something different, we need something that actually creates a sense of ownership among employees, that they can actually solve some of their biggest challenges and get the support they need from management, and I think that will close the epidemic of this disengagement.

Rachel Salaman: Broadly speaking that is what your book is about, but can you just give us the headline ideas? Now, what's the alternative to those types of disengagement you described?

Jesse Sostrin: I think it starts with actually owning your own career. I talk a lot about the working life that we all have, and, in fact, I'm Gen X, which means I'm looking at a future of maybe another 40 years in the world of work. So, if I step back and look at the span of my career, depending on advances in biomedicine and my own health and wits and keeping those about me, I might work 70 years, so that old adage that life is a working life has never been more true. So, I think the first alternative is to say, "I truly am responsible for creating the pathway to the working life that I want." So if I don't take ownership over understanding how I can be a continuous learner and performer, basically becoming my own HR department or my own career coach if you will, then I'm sort of surrendering that potential, and I'm trusting that I might get that from the organization with whom I work, and as you know some of the biggest cuts in the last 10 years have been around employee development, leadership and management training. So I think it all starts with taking ownership over the path we're on within our working life, and this ability and potential for us to figure out what's most important right now. I call that becoming "future proof." When you have the skillset that allows you to determine what's most important, the value that you can contribute to the team and the organization, and that fundamental purpose of your role, then you can start working according to that, and, in some cases, managing up allows you to shine in ways that you previously were unable to when you were simply defined by that superficial job description.

Rachel Salaman: Why is it so difficult to convey the true nature of a job in a job description?

Jesse Sostrin: That's a really important question, and I think some of the initial things to point to are just complexity for one. There is a certain complexity in what a person does and how it fits into an organization, particularly in larger organizations. There is also a competing desire to keep things simple, so you might see a job description that's just a couple of pages long, and there is this assumption that, well, we can't take the time to map out all of the interdependent roles and expectations. There is also difficulty in understanding what is the priority and what's most important, and then there are some trends and habits that we have that really aren't that productive in organizational life. One of them is performance whitewashing, where we kind of assume that all goals are the same, and we don't necessarily take the time to say, "Here are the core performance requirements that are most important." And another is something called "skills incompetence." That's where you put a lot of important tasks kind of within a set of less important tasks, and you lose sight of the ones that actually are most important and valuable on the big picture, so you look busy but you're not necessarily productive. I think our job descriptions in a large part follow that kind of framework, and it really is a difficult task if your entire recruitment and selection process is designed around this, what I call the "standard model of work," where there is that superficial take on tasks and activities, but not a truer sense of the value added contributions, the important performance and priorities that an individual role contributes to the team, and of course the skills and competencies that are required for that successful candidate.

Rachel Salaman: So it's left to the candidates themselves to work that all out if they want to excel in their roles, and in your book you suggest that people follow what you call the RITE model to help them understand their job in its entirety and then do it excellently. The R of RITE stands for "reveal your hidden curriculum of work," and we've already talked about what that is, but what's the first step on that ladder to revealing it?

Jesse Sostrin: I think the first step is to actually pull out that job description. And if you apply a few questions, very straightforward questions to that, you can begin to look within it. So, I have six questions in the book and I've designed this to appeal to managers who are really striving to engage their employees in different ways, and to work with them according to the truer tasks of the job, but also for the individual contributor who is trying to assess their career and their job performance. The first question is really looking at that superficial level: "What statement describes your best role?" And then, "What tasks and activities absorb most of your time?" And then finally, "What are some of the common challenges that prevent you from getting good work done?" So, those first three questions are really easy to answer because they are about the everyday experience, they are about the standard model work. However, the next three questions dig a little bit deeper, and they look at those first three in converse. So, what single statement reveals your vital purpose to the organization, which of your contributions have the greatest value to the organization or team, and, finally, where are some of the hidden challenges as to delivering this value. Going through those six questions is a really easy 15-minute exercise that allows you to start to lift the veil on your everyday expectations of work to see, well, wait a minute, it is a little bit more complex, and this is why I've bumped up against that challenge, and you can start to piece together a truer picture of the demands you face on the job.

Rachel Salaman: And you talk about the job within a job in the book, and that it has three dimensions, what are these?

Jesse Sostrin: Once you've completed this mental process and mapped out the hidden side of work, you recognize that, "OK, I'm actually working two jobs," and I have a little fun with this. But it's so true, and I experienced this as a new professional, and the first time I became a manager I really bumped up against it and started developing the scars to prove that I learned these lessons the hard way, but once you have that job within the job mapped out, you have to understand that nobody is an island. So, we are constantly working with people who are above us, who are lateral to us, and, in some cases if we're managers, who are below us in the organizational chart. And I think it's critical to understand how our job interacts in these three dimensions. So, just for example on the managing up piece, everybody has a boss, and if you take a few minutes to just think through questions such as, "How much does my boss or my manager know or understand about my actual job within the job, and including the value that I'm contributing?" Because the reality is often we sit down to that annual performance review, and what we find is that we're held accountable for things on paper that may or may not have played out over the course of that preceding year. And so it's important to manage up in the regard of sharing the true demands that you actually are working on, and giving your direct manager an opportunity to support you. So how can you communicate and make her aware of the true challenges you face on a job? How might they respond if you actually took the time to show that perspective with them? How can you create those accountabilities for the performance elements that you are truly focused on, versus the ones that on paper look important, but actually may not on a day-to-day reality?

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Rachel Salaman: In the book you talk about the importance of identifying barriers to the hidden curriculum, can you tell us what you mean by this, and your main points?

Jesse Sostrin: This is a big part of my work because I've kind of been a cartographer of sorts over the last 10, 15 years, and a lot of my research is focused on identifying those learning and performance barriers that are most common in the world of work. So, just by way of definition, I look at a barrier and define it as any expressed behavior, attitude, or action that distracts or impedes or prevents our own individual and team learning and performance. So that's a wide definition, but what I mean specifically is that there are these everyday challenges we face, our communication breaks down, or we've got change fatigue because there is just too much change in a short period of time and people are burning out or checking out, or maybe we're tripping over each other because there are no clear goals or our roles are undefined, or people are afraid to speak up because there is an absence of dialog or a culture of fear. These are some of the everyday challenges that many people can point to and say, "Yes, I relate to that." But there are also a lot more elusive barriers that kind of are systemic, and we don't necessarily see them because they are a part of that hidden side of work. And, in some cases, there is an anxiety and distraction, or just avoidance of information, because people are on overload, and when you can't communicate real-time information, you can't expect to stay in alignment with people and priorities, so you can see that particular barrier is kind of challenging because you don't necessarily know it's happening until you see the effects of it. Other more elusive barriers might include attempting to implement change without looking at the entire system that holds all behaviors in place. This is called "tampering." It's where you try to make a change by starting on the outside going in, and that seldom works. Or, in some cases, maybe there's just an epidemic failure of a culture to collaborate because there is a sense of inter-competition, there are polarized views and split alliances because people are rewarded for excelling in ways that actually prompt people to compete, versus to collaborate with one another. So there are all kinds of barriers all over the place, and if you're going to be effective in your working life, you've got to be able to really identify the root cause of what's happening and why. So I present a series of tools, and give people a sense of how they can actually draw out their everyday challenges in simple ways, so that they can pinpoint exactly what's happening and actually transform it into an opportunity for learning and performance.

Rachel Salaman: Now here you're referring to Nav Maps, which comes under the T of the RITE model, transforming barriers and navigating your hidden path to success at work. Tell us about Nav Maps.

Jesse Sostrin: Well, Nav Maps are the picture of what happens when you identify something that gets in the way of getting good work done, and you take those steps that we just described to actually transform it. And sometimes people ask me, "Jesse, you're an executive coach, you're this consultant that helps a lot of people, don't you know that the trend is to talk about what's working, and to focus on your strengths, and to use an appreciative line of questioning to focus on how to get improvement? Why all this focus on barriers?" And what I tell people is that barriers are the signposts that point us towards the improved learning and performance we need, so they are kind of our friends, and if we can really master the ability to understand them and dissect them, I think they hold a lot of potential for innovation and change within organizations. So, for me, Nav Maps are those tools that kind of visually untangle the situation. It uses four interrelated elements, so each step is vital and important by itself, but taken together they create a picture. It's a map, and it's a graphic tool that you can use both as an individual or a team to create the visual capacity to name a complex challenge and look at a path towards resolving it.

Rachel Salaman: In the book you anticipate that some readers will think they don't have time to make a Nav Map, it will just seem like too much effort, and then you show why it's worth creating the time for it. What are your points here, and some tips for actually creating one?

Jesse Sostrin: The interesting thing is that one of the biggest excuses we all have and use is the lack of time, and we've all heard that there's only 24 hours in a day, and as far as I know that's true for everybody, but with a little bit of nous and common sense I show my readers how they can actually create 20 percent more productivity every day. But before I go into that and I will just briefly, I think it's important to ask the question in reverse. How can you not afford to take the time to invest in your own continued professional development? If, in some cases, organizations have virtually abandoned their investment in employees, and thankfully that's not the case across the board, there are still some outstanding companies who are developing people and investing in their growth, but actually the majority don't. And so if you don't take the reins of your own working life, and if you don't set the trajectory by creating habits of investment now, over the course of four, five, six, seven decades of work you are going to be the one that's not future proofed, you are going to be the one where somebody younger, smarter, and faster right behind you takes your place. So, I think it's in our best interests to figure out how we can make the time. So by hacking your existing meeting schedule you can create that 20 percent additional productivity. And the way this works is just looking at some simple statistics, that one cross-cutting feature that we all do in organizational life is we attend lots and lots of meetings, and in some cases the estimate is that people in professional services, for example, spend up to 65 percent to 80 percent of their time in meetings. That translates into 204 working days. If you can imagine hacking that and taking a little bit of time on the front end, so as you are walking down the hallway to the meeting, as you're sitting in the interview room waiting for that meeting to start, as you are about to make the phone call to join the conference line, what is it that you can be focused on? It goes back to those questions around the job within the job. So you might ask, "What vital purpose can I play at this meeting to make something productive happen?" "What contributions can I deliver during the meeting that will add the greatest value?" "What are some of the challenges that might come up to make it hard for me or for us to have a successful meetings?" And, selfishly, "Which of my challenges, and which of my opportunities and priorities, can I bring some focus and attention to during the meeting to get support, to get input on?" Just that small shift in how we use our time might change the typical response to meetings, which is unfortunately quite cynical; most people think they are unproductive.

Rachel Salaman: So once they've created this time, what do they need to know about making a Nav Map?

Jesse Sostrin: I suggest that, like anything new, you start small. And the first step in this four-part process is to create what I call a "constellation of barriers." Just if your listeners can envision a circle on a piece of paper, in that circle you try to write down what you think the core issue is of the core barrier, and with some arms and some peripheral circles you try to write down a sense of what else that issue creates. And in the book I have lots of examples and case studies of people who have no drawing experience, and who have no prior background in their own professional development, and I show very clearly how anyone can pick this up with a little bit of effort and focused attention. The reason I suggest starting with the constellation is because it's informative by itself, especially if you're dealing with a challenge that intersects with other people. So the concept of that constellation is that just like points of light in the night sky, our barriers to performance cluster together, and so when you have a certain challenge it's going to push and pull other related barriers into place, and that precise formation of interconnected barriers show the root cause at the center. So you can scratch it out, you can try again, the wording doesn't matter, what's important is that you get the essence of it. And when you start to create a clearer picture of the challenge and the impact that it creates with those peripheral circles, you actually start to see, OK, I now have a greater sense of what's happening here. It also by default allows you to step back objectively and see a pattern, when we are so close to a challenge that we face we often cannot escape its gravity, so we have a hard time seeing it for what it is, including our place or our role in it.

Rachel Salaman: Another visual tool in the book is the daily compass, so how does that one help?

Jesse Sostrin: Any behavior change is really difficult, and one of the things that as somebody who has coached hundreds and hundreds of people to work through their challenges, I have seen first-hand that the initial gains that we make when there's a new concept or a new idea we get excited about it, we gain some early traction, those gains are just as easily lost if there's not a commitment to behavior change, and behavior change is the hardest thing to do, and the daily compass is simply a set of tools that allows you to commit for the long term. It truly is this question of engaging in something for your working life, and creating the habits and patterns of communication and interaction with others that can stand the test of time. So, each of the four parts of the compass co-ordinate to some of the important pieces of the book. So, for example, your true north is truly understanding your value added contribution and the vital purpose you play actually provide a lot of example purpose profiles, which are these sorts of very streamlined summaries of what people do when they really contribute to the team and the organization, and I give my readers the chance to find themselves among those profiles and then to craft their own as part of their future-proof plan. But that true north is what keeps you focused and centered, keeps you value added, keeps you future proofed, and so, along with the other three directions, it's the daily commitment that it takes to stay ahead of the curve.

Rachel Salaman: Now most of what we've talked about so far is directed at individual contributors, how does it translate to teams?

Jesse Sostrin: We spend a lot of time on teams, and so it's really important for me to understand how to translate something that's an individual tool for professional development to a team-based tool, and these Nav Maps actually are really appropriate for a team. One of the things that a team can do when they're facing a challenge is to use the Nav Map sequence to diagnose and resolve some of their challenges, and again in the book I provide many examples and case studies where teams do that. But really when we talk about teams we are kind of talking about the manager, and I think it's important for us to spend a minute talking about that, because the number one reason that a person leaves a job is because of the quality of the relationship they have with their direct manager, and I think when a manager acknowledges that there's a hidden curriculum of work, they have no choice but to manage differently. And in response to that, a couple of the things that managers can do to ensure that their team is supported is to really establish that trust-based relationship where the quality of the employee's working life is at the center of importance. I honestly think this is one of the most critical links to this epidemic of disengagement we spoke about earlier. When I feel like my manager understands that I've got a lot of time left in the world of work and that the quality of my experience and the outcomes I experience, my access to good assignments, my potential for advancement, when I feel like they have that as their interest and there is a mutual picture that I call a "mutual agenda," I think that the strength of that relationship, and the trust and the credibility that the manager has, is something that really reduces turnover quite a bit. People are willing to stay and follow leaders who care about them in that regard. The next most important thing they can do is to really assess that individual's knowledge, skills, and set of competencies in relation to the true demands of their job within the job. If you are my manager, for example, and you don't have a clue about what the true demands of my job are, how can you support me in that? And, more importantly, how can I know that you actually are advocating for me and providing the resources I need to get the job done. So, again, one of the most important things a manager can do is to spend some time breaking down that job description, and saying, "Here's what it says on paper, but we both know that you're facing challenges that go beyond this, but spend some time working through these so that we're on the same page and we're clear about what they are, and, as your manager, it's my job to give you that real-time feedback on how to reset your priorities as conditions change, as people change and as expectations evolve."

Rachel Salaman: In the book you offer a seven-step plan for "leaders to become the scaffolding for others to climb" is how you put it. What do you mean by that, and what are the most important steps out of those seven?

Jesse Sostrin: The analogy of being the scaffolding is important to me, because at one level I sometimes think we inflate the role and impact of leaders, and at the same time I feel like we underestimate it. Leaders are just pivotal because they are at that intersection where decisions are made about budgets and people, difficult assessments of current priorities and challenges are made, they're just at the table when some of those most challenging and complex interactions occur. And, as I said earlier, the relationship that a manager has with his or her direct report is that pivotal link to things like engagement and turnover and sustainability of performance, so one of the things that I think is important in these seven steps is truly the thought process of what it means to give somebody a leg up, it's this concept that if I hire somebody and expect to invest in them, to make them better, whether they stay for the long-term or not, I am creating a climate for the conditions where people can fully invest back, and I think sometimes when we look at the employee disengagement issue we hyper focus on the worker's side of the equation and we wonder why is that 71 percent so disengaged, whether it's passive or active disengagement. In reality I think we should put the lens on managers and raise the bar for them, and if leaders are the scaffolding for people to actually get that leg up and get that support and that advocate, I think people are much more willing to give their best contribution. So this idea of sponsoring somebody, whether it's through a formal mentoring program or whether it's simply carrying out a level that engages and produces a higher degree of investment from the manager, and that's the most important thing a leader can do in my opinion.

Rachel Salaman: And for individual team members at all levels, where should they start the process of getting beyond the job description?

Jesse Sostrin: I recommend starting with the six questions that allow you to take a peek inside your standard job description and start to identify your job within the job; those six questions we talked a little bit about earlier, and it really starts with understanding why is this position on the organization chart, there's got to be some purpose it plays, there's got to be some value it contributes and of course there are probably some challenges with delivering that purpose and value. Once you start there, again you begin to look at the world of work differently, and to me it's that focused attention that there's the presenting side of work that we all know about, but if we get more confident and if we get more comfortable talking about the hidden side of work, the hidden curriculum, the barriers that we face, the tools are there to resolve them. It's really about seeing differently, so I suggest starting with the six questions and learning to see the hidden side of work just as easily as you see those everyday frustrations, and rather than complaining about them or being frustrated by them, we can see the root causes and conditions that sustain them and do something with them, and this is an investment in ourselves after all, so it's absolutely worth the time and the energy to learn how to see differently.

Rachel Salaman: Jesse Sostrin, thank you very much for joining us.

Jesse Sostrin: Thank you, it's been my pleasure.

Rachel Salaman: The name of Jesse's book again is "Beyond the Job Description: How Managers and Employees Can Navigate the True Demands of the Job," and you can find out more about him and his work at www.sostrinconsulting.com. I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview, until then goodbye.

I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview, until then goodbye.