Your team can help design new roles

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Your team can help design new roles

In the brave new world of unbundled work, you're going to need to think differently about the way that work is designed, and it starts with how you hire someone into your team. Remember that your team is a pool of problem-solvers. Defining the needs for a new or replaced role on the team is itself a problem they need to help solve. Why would you define the work that needs to be done without their involvement? In fact, every time you need to bring a worker into the team in whatever role and for whatever period of time, it's an opportunity to give your team practice in collaboration, and to rethink how they approach problem-solving.

Start by asking the team to talk about the problems to be solved that aren't being solved right now. The more detail the team can use to describe the problems, the more the person who'll be performing the work will be prepared to solve them. And don't forget to connect the problems to be solved with the strategic goals of your group. That anchors the role in the purpose of the team and of the overall organization. It's also important to show the team your own thoughts on the challenges that are involved in the work.

But it's your call if your team should do that, their own brainstorming first. If they're likely to be deeply swayed by your thinking, or worse to simply bow to your suggestions because they want to please you, hold off on providing your input. Make sure the team prioritizes the problems to be solved in terms of the time and importance of the challenges. Then ask them to suggest what kinds of skills and experience might be useful to solve those problems. Be sure to call out to the team that one of the problems they need to solve is the possibility of their own unconscious bias.

Are they defining the problems to be solved and suggesting the kinds of skills and experience that could solve them based solely on their own experiences, or on those of a previous worker in the role, it has to be somebody like Bruce or Mary. That's a certain path to homogeneity, a team where everybody thinks and looks the same. Think instead of this kind of collaborative hiring process as another opportunity to practice your own flexibility. As a manager your most important deliverable is a set of results from the work performed by your team.

So, consider whether you might even want to let the team be responsible for defining the work to be done in the new or replaced role, and to commit to ensuring that the new team member is successfully able to deliver the results that you need. What this doesn't mean is that your team members are automatically involved in managing the new worker. Make sure you mention that during the design process. So, how can you try this out? If you don't want to do it with your whole team try it with the one worker who knows the most about an open position's problems.

See if that gives you some new information that can be useful.


Source: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/hiring-and-developing-your-future-workforce/your-team-can-help-design-new-roles