Designed for Life

Although generally unrecognized, it is difficult to think of a cultural bondage more insidious, costly and destructive of human life and values than the mismatch between people and the jobs they occupy. Studies reporting on the mismatch between employee strengths and job requirements vary in shades of darkness: surveyist Yankelovich reports 13% of workers studied find their work truly meaningful; Greenberg reports only 20% of the population studied (over a 16 year period; 7,000 corporations; 350,000 employees) were in jobs making use of their talents; Sampson describes a survey of 55 companies where 50% of the managers hired in a preceding three-year period had not worked out," and in my experience over 20 years with government and industrial employees, only one out of three managers was suitable for the position. If you add educational mismatch to this stew, it is fair to conclude that most people spend most of their lives in what for them is meaningless toil.

To the extent organizations or individuals suffer from job mismatch, they are imitative, lifeless, stressed, and inevitably mediocre in output. Wherever you look, job mismatch reveals itself in familiar attitudes: petulance, sullenness, unresponsiveness, lack of initiative, indifference. Regardless of level or function, when work does not engage the heart and minds of employees, the employer reaps a litany of problems: productivity problems, emotional problems, morale problems, loyalty problems, conflict problems, and troublemaker problems.

Unfortunately, negative attitudes and the problems accompanying job misfit frequently betray a storm going on inside the person. Evidence is growing that job misfit and attendant stresses contribute directly to heart and other circulatory ailments, marital breakdown, alcoholism, drug addition, and other mental and emotional disorders, premature death or crippling disability.

Moreover, underutilization is a cause of destructive stress, as well as misutilization. A recent book on stress and its impact on profits noted that in one year, premature employee deaths cost $19.4 billion; recruiting replacements for executives felled by heart disease cost $700 million; and for every employee who dies from industrial hazards or accidents, 50 employees die from cardiovascular disease. Despair is expensive.

Why is there so much job mismatch? A certain amount of it is the result of what happens once an employee is in a suitable job; often the job runs out of its motivational value to them. Examples are builders who now have to maintain a system or an organization or a territory they developed; overcomers who want to be severely tested by a difficult challenge and have done so successfully; learners who seek to become proficient at a skill and demonstrate their expertise, but then lose interest in it.

Other examples of 'obsolescence' are where jobs change or go through stages of aging - functions/businesses/markets that move from embryonic to growth to maturity may require different abilities at different stages; product changes in pricing, marketing strategy, or manufacturing methods, which can in turn require different kinds or mixes of abilities; marked shifts in a governing economy can create new pressures to produce and/or downsize and/or control, which can render previous managerial styles obsolete.

Then there are factors related to a specific job function which can create mismatch, for example: a new boss different from the previous one in the kind and amount of direction (participative or autocratic) or in visibility (giving or withholding); ownership or policy changes which transform one or many jobs from fundamental knowledge to problem-solving (research); from being creative to being imitative (product development); from being proactive to being reactive (labor relations); physical changes in location to down the hall or across town, away from the seat of influence and power.

Apart from such cases, (which cry out for management attention), job mismatch occurs primarily because organizations make hiring and promotion decisions on the basis of unreliable data, the foremost and everpopular kind being current and past performance data. As soon as you rely on how well the employee has performed in current and past jobs as a principal indicator of promotability to a different type of position, you effectively institutionalize the Peter Principle. Following that mistaken policy loses to the organization a depressing number of excellent contributors in research, engineering, sales, accountancy, marketing, finance, personnel, labor relations, public affairs ... and gains almost as many inept, unmotivated supervisors.

However, a new round of job mismatch decisions is in the offing, for at least some of the promotees do an acceptable job in their new assignments because they are already good at the specialty/ function. But then mistakes are commonly made by promoting those who are effective because of personal preeminence to the next level, where they are faced with supervising people doing something at which they have no expertise. A similar problem occurs in promoting people who are effective leading one project or one team, where they manage by personal interaction and example, to a multi-project or multi-team level where it is almost impossible for them to cover all bases. At a somewhat higher level are cases of managers, quite effective at one plant or territory, being promoted to a position supervising multi-plants/territories. The next round of decisions resulting in mismatch is 'promotion' or transfer into the executive ranks, where the same type of mistakes continue to be made - brilliant professionals or team leaders or staff specialists put in operating management roles, when they in fact have little interest or skill in running anything.

Another type of unreliable data, because it lacks predictive power, has to do with the mistaken weight of certain education or grades received. For example, what courses a person studied at college or university is perceived to define his or her qualifications. This is a most illogical conclusion, since education never creates a new talent; it only exercises and gives a vocabulary to develop what already exists. Grades received or type and length of education are all suspect data; they may or may not reveal a strength and should be thoughtfully weighted, because they do not correlate to success in the world of work. The same irrelevance is true of the type and length of work experience.

Similarly, whether a person is bright, has initiative, a high energy level, is imaginative, can handle ambiguity, is hardworking, persevering or emotionally stable is suspect data unless it is tied to a focussing issue or activity; that is, Bright at what? Hardworking at what? Imaginative at what? To my knowledge, there is no correlation between such generic qualities standing alone and success in any field. The common assumption that particular education or experience somehow invests the person with an ability and a motivation to use it appropriate to the need involved leads many decisions (and people) astray

Struggling to improve their decisions about people, organizations resort to testing and generate employee 'profiles' supposedly able to predict future performance. Unfortunately, employee response is limited by the instrument or exercise and so does not reveal how the employee would perform the job if there were room to move. Employees perceive and attempt to perform jobs in accordance with a complex pattern of personal motivations. Employers, and frequently their advisers, assume that test scores reflect the motivational dynamics of the individual tested. This assumption is false. Such testing makes sense where you have identified a particular skill or capability as absolutely critical to success on the job, and you test the skill- not the motivation. Even here the problem remains of determining whether the possessor of that skill(s) will produce it on the job, for unless you hook measurements into motivation, predictions have only random success.

References

Yankelovich, Daniel, Putting work ethic to work. Public Agenda , Foundation. 1983

Greenberg, Dr. Herbert M. Marketing Survey and Research Corporation. Princeton, New Jersey.

Sampson, Richard. Managing the Managers. McGraw Hill. 1965 (pI58)

SIMAŽ AND JOB MISMATCH