The Hindu Business Line : Begin with job clarity

The foremost condition of performance is that employees know what is expected of them at work. This is the first of the twelve findings, which emerged from a million interviews stored in the Gallup Organisation's database. But that was long ago. 'First, Break All The Rules,' a book published in 1999, had challenged traditional thinking with the dozen bold statements and codified the '12 elements of work life... the core of the unwritten social contract between employee and employer.' Since then, the 12 elements have achieved so much popularity that they are measured in more than 40 languages in 114 countries, and Gallup's digital vault holds more than ten million responses. So, here comes a sequel: '12: The Elements of Great Managing,' by Rodd Wagner and James K. Harter (www.landmarkonthenet.com). The book describes the elements in detail and narrates stories of great managers who epitomise the same. "Managing is not some a morphous, 'difficult to quantify' concept," the authors say. "One of the dumbest things companies do is try to make their 'human resources' more productive while fighting what makes them human." Why is the first element, viz. job clarity, important? Because "so much of an enterprise's efficiency depends on the seamless combination of personal responsibilities." Groups that have high scores on this item are more productive, profitable and creativ e, the authors find. Good scores on this element "correlate with productivity gains of 5-10 per cent, thousands more happy customers, and 10-20 per cent fewer on-the-job accidents." Yet, to many employees, it may be a mystery as to what they are supposed to be doing in the company. Shockingly, this malaise is 'amazingly common' among 'individuals making large salaries'. Knowing what is expected is more than a job description, explains the book. "It's a detailed understanding of how what one person is supposed to do fits in with what everyone else is supposed to do, and how those expectations change when circumstances ch ange." The first element suffers among middle managers, especially in businesses that become 'fat and complacent' after tasting success, and create 'enough layers of management and distance from the front lines'. The authors cite, as example, this from a training session for a group of managers from one Fortune 500 enterprise: "There were 25 managers in the room. Only five could make a credible connection between their jobs and the profits of the business." If the managers had been a jazz group, they would have been no different from "the first day of fourth-grade band, with a lot of cacophonous honking and flipping through the printed music." Compulsory read.

D.Murali
http://BookPeek.blogspot.com

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