The Metiss Group's Blog

Most parents know the best way to get their kid’s buy-in on family decisions is to have the kids be a part of the decision making process.  We have one colleague who was dreading a family vacation with his two teenagers.  Instead of he and his wife planning the trip, he had his son and daughter plan several of the activities.  The family ended up having one of their best vacations.  Getting group input when putting together jobs is helpful, too.

Whether you are defining jobs using a traditional job description or an Accountability Matrix (our recommendation), you’ll want to get input from people who interact with the individual in the job when outlining the key requirements.

The supervisor and/or HR are generally responsible for defining the requirements for a job.  Soliciting input from those closest to the job, or those impacted by how well the job is performed provides several important advantages:

• the people working closely with the job know whether it’s being done correctly or not — often because it impacts their work;
• gaining input from these stakeholders helps create more robust success factors for the job;
• consulting the stakeholders creates a commitment from them to the individual in the job to succeed since they had a hand in defining it;
• when coupled with a disciplined selection process, the learning curve is shortened because involved co-workers aren’t just waiting for the new hire to fail.

Just imagine the support felt by a new hire!

Empower hiring managers to ask for input from a job’s stakeholders when defining their direct report’s jobs and they will experience more success.

This entry was posted on June 16, 2014 at 5:00 am and is filed under Leadership, Performance Acceleration, Selection. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.