For decades, the traditional job description has followed a familiar formula: job title, brief summary, a long list of duties, minimum qualifications, and perhaps the obligatory (and often dredded) phrase, “other duties as assigned.”
That may be sufficient for documenting that a position exists. It is far less effective at explaining what success in that position actually looks like.
A well-designed job description should do much more than simply catalog tasks. It should establish a shared understanding of expectations between the organization and the employee about why the position exists, what results it is expected to produce, what the employee owns, and how the work should be performed.
That is the philosophy behind TMTBSI’s more robust approach to job descriptions.
Traditional Job Descriptions Describe Activity. Great Ones Define Results.
One of the biggest shortcomings of the conventional job description is its emphasis on activity:
- Manage employees.
- Respond to customers.
- Prepare reports.
- Attend meetings.
- Maintain records.
These statements tell an employee what they may spend time doing, but they do not explain what those activities are supposed to accomplish, what competencies or character traits are required to succeed, or the company’s priority order of how work time should be allocated.
Our approach begins by identifying Key Outcomes.
Instead of merely saying that a General Manager oversees operations, for example, the position can be accountable for outcomes such as operational excellence, financial performance, team development, customer satisfaction, process improvement, and effective asset utilization.
That changes the conversation.
The question is no longer simply, “Did you perform the task?”
It becomes, “Did your work produce the result the organization needs?”
That is a much stronger foundation for accountability and performance management.
Responsibilities Need Context, Not Just Length
Many job descriptions become dumping grounds. Every responsibility anyone can remember gets added to an ever-growing list.
Eventually, the document may be technically comprehensive while becoming practically unusable.
Our format organizes responsibilities into a limited number of meaningful functional areas. A customer relationship role, for example, can be structured around client operational excellence, discovery and assessment, solution implementation, relationship management, and continuous improvement rather than presenting dozens of disconnected activities.
This helps employees understand not only individual tasks, but the larger areas of ownership those tasks support.
It also makes the description far more useful to supervisors. Managers can coach, delegate, evaluate performance, and discuss priorities around clearly defined areas of responsibility instead of referring to an unstructured checklist.
Competencies Answer the Question: “What Must This Person Be Good At?”
Responsibilities and competencies are not the same thing.
A responsibility describes what someone owns. A competency describes what someone must be capable of doing well to successfully own it.
That distinction is frequently missing from traditional job descriptions.
Depending upon the position, competencies might include strategic leadership, financial acumen, client relationship management, process optimization, communication, technical proficiency, analytical problem solving, project management, or industry expertise.
Identifying these capabilities creates another important benefit: the job description becomes more useful throughout the employee lifecycle.
The same document can help inform recruiting, interviewing, selection, onboarding, training, coaching, professional development, and performance discussions.
Character Matters!!!
Technical competence alone does not guarantee organizational success.
An employee can be exceptionally skilled and still damage a team, a customer relationship, or an organization’s reputation if the person’s behavior is inconsistent with its values.
That is why our job descriptions deliberately identify Required Character Traits.
Integrity, humility, accountability, dependability, service-mindedness, positivity, protectiveness, and teamwork are not decorative statements tucked into a values poster. They describe expectations for how employees conduct themselves while accomplishing the workday in and day out.
This is an important distinction.
A robust job description should define both performance expectations and behavioral expectations.
Organizations need both.
The Real Problem Is Unspoken Assumptions/Expectations
Perhaps the greatest weakness of the traditional job description is not what it says.
It is what everyone assumes it says.
The owner assumes the manager understands what “manage the department” means. The manager assumes the employee knows what “excellent customer service” looks like. The employee assumes certain responsibilities belong to someone else.
Months later, those assumptions become performance problems.
A robust job description forces the organization to answer questions before they become misunderstandings:
- Why does this position exist?
- What results must it produce?
- What does the employee actually own?
- What capabilities are necessary to succeed?
- What behaviors does the organization expect?
- Under what conditions will the work be performed?
Those questions require more thought than copying last year’s job description from a shared drive.
They are also considerably more valuable.
From HR Document to Management Tool
This may be the most important distinction of all.
A traditional job description is often treated as an HR document that gets reviewed when someone is hired and then disappears into a personnel file.
A robust job description should be a living management document.
It can establish expectations during recruiting. It can structure interview questions. It can guide onboarding. It can identify training needs. It can provide the framework for one-on-one meetings. It can support performance evaluations. And when responsibilities change, it can help leadership determine whether the role itself needs to evolve.
In other words, the job description should not simply document employment.
It should help manage it with intention and purpose.
When thoughtfully constructed, a job description becomes something much more valuable than a list of things an employee is supposed to do. It becomes a mutual understanding of purpose, results, responsibility, capability, character, and accountability.
And that is ultimately the difference between describing a job and defining success in one.
If you would like our support in redesigning your team’s job descriptions, please reach out to us!