Don't Make Rules: Define Roles
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Imagine two employees of a company, both of which are hired as widget designers. The first, Bob, is incredibly motivated and responsible; he has a lot of experience. He’s the kind of guy you can basically set loose on tasks and expect to see good results from; hiring him was basically installing an automatic productivity generator in your company.
The second, James, isn’t like that at all. He’s relatively new to the field and is learning the ropes. He’s also to some extent learning how to work in general; he’s figuring out what is appropriate in a workplace, what kind of freedoms he has to experiment with his job, how he fits in the context of his company and what kind of risk tolerance the company has. Whereas Bob knows all this stuff instinctively and can safely improvise, James would often make mistakes without restrictions.
A lot of companies (we’d argue most) respond to this in a very specific way: they make rules. And in this scenario the rules are responding to James; they are tailored to preventing particular problems James is causing. This would be exactly what you want, except for one thing: Rules like this are almost never implemented as “rules for just James”; they are typically applied generally to everyone under a particular job title, or (worse) applied company-wide. Only James made a particular mistake, but not only James has to live with the rule.
Let’s assume the rule was made in response to James consistently over-reaching or over-spending on projects, and see how that affects Bob. Bob was previously able to accurately judge where he needed to get approvals from higher-ups before and skip getting them where they weren’t needed, but now he has to get approval on everything. Sometimes this might mean he’s merely slowed down, which is bad: everything he does costs more and takes longer to produce results.
This has even bigger effects on innovation. Bob used to be able to run experiments at a certain cost to his time, effort and stress levels; rules raise that cost. Even people with high initiative, action-based personalities respond to disincentives; in the best case, giving rules designed for James to Bob will make him experiment less. If you make the costs of going above-and-beyond higher, he’s going to innovate less and improve less. This isn’t a “maybe” situation; if you make Bob move slower, he’s going to do less. It’s as negative as it is certain. And that’s if Bob sticks around; he presumably joined your company to accomplish something; there’s a limit to how many hurdles people will tolerate before they give up and start looking for another track with fewer obstacles.
This isn’t a new problem, and when most try to solve it they usually go a direction that translates into something like “improved rules”. The idea is to make rules for your rules, trying to build up a system that helps you make better rules that restrict less or better target specific problems. This might be an improvement, but it’s going to run into a lot of the same problems; rules still tend to apply to groups rather than individuals, and people are still slowed down both following and enforcing them. Add to this the fact that rules tend to accumulate over time, and eventually you are back in the same situation: your productive, experienced people who have earned freedom are hamstrung by rules built for someone else’s needs.
Clipboard Health proposes something different. We are big fans of picking up a problem and flipping it upside-down to get a different perspective, and in doing so with this topic we discovered that the problems we’ve described with rules are just a symptom: The real problem is how we think about job roles.
Every job role has a certain space defined by responsibilities and freedoms; it’s built of a number of modular privileges (for instance, the ability to hire or to experiment) that are cobbled together to create a “space” a person with a particular job title operates in. Rules are fundamentally an attempt to reduce and define that space, and fundamentally move in the direction of Bob being cramped for the sake of keeping James out of trouble.
But here’s the takeaway, bolded for emphasis: The problem is not the rules in a particular space. It’s that Bob and James should have never been in the same space to begin with.
When you zoom in on this problem, you realize that the issue not a failing of the wrong rules or too many rules, it’s one of ill-defined roles. It’s a problem of treating job descriptions as catch-alls that people alter themselves to fit, rather than taking the time to create a role with freedoms and privileges that are custom-fit to each individual to make them as productive as possible.
Rather than putting the burden of effort on every employee to follow rules in a general space, it’s much better to spend the time to explicitly define where each team member’s boundaries are individually, and to expand or shrink those boundaries based on their performance and noone elses, leaving each team member with a defined space they have complete, rule-free freedom within. It’s an increased up-front cost to a limited amount of people (mostly management) that results in huge gains in speed and flexibility for every individual in the company.
Rules still have a place in this system, but a much more restricted role: what rules remain should address only problems that everyone is equally likely to make, or exist to avoid threats that are legitimately so large they outweigh any productivity concerns. You are left with a small, manageable list of rules that exist only when they are absolutely necessary for everyone.
This is a switch on a fundamental level, from huge, expansive job roles constricted by rules to a manageable size to smaller, bespoke roles focus that looks to acquire talent and then create the space that talent can be maximally fast, free and productive in. It’s not free, but the alternative is a company that invariably grows slower as it grows larger and requires a larger and larger bureaucracy to function. Maintaining speed means shaking free of the rules - it’s rethink-everything hard, but it’s worth it.
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