3 Steps to Stop Pigeonholing Your Employees and Start Boosting Their Productivity

Are formal business titles killing your team’s productivity? IT Professional Services leader Ken Lownie explains why locking your employees into narrowly defined roles not only stifles their personal development, it also hurts your bottom line.

As expansion-stage software companies build out their professional services business, they often fall into the trap of locking new staff members into narrowly defined roles that inhibit their utilization and development. You can avoid this pitfall, however, by explicitly separating the roles that team members play on projects from their formal titles and levels.
A professional services team is a lot like a theater group in Shakespeare’s time. Back then, The Lord Chamberlain’s Men (Shakespeare’s troupe) would perform many different plays throughout the season. To do this, a player might take the role of Hamlet on one night and play one of the witches in Macbeth on another. Individual players weren’t locked into a single role, because if they were, they’d wind up sitting out on many performances.
And so it is with a professional services team. If you hire someone and give them the title of project manager, what are they supposed to do when there’s no need for a PM? Maybe there are times when you need a business analyst, instead. You’re better off giving that person the title “Senior Consultant” and letting them assume the role of project manager when that role is needed and other ones when it’s not.

3 Benefits of Separating Roles and Titles

The benefits of this more flexible model are many. Here are three at the top of the list:
1) Broader Utilization
First, there is the obvious opportunity to improve utilization, because your “cast” members aren’t sitting on the bench waiting for the next project that needs them in a narrowly defined role.
2) Personal Development
Perhaps more importantly, individuals have the chance to perform many roles, which helps them build a stronger set of skills and a broader awareness of all the parts of a project. That also improves their understanding of how the different parts of a project come together — important insight for their development as services professionals.
3) Culture of Adaptability and Improvement
A third benefit is a little less obvious, but has to do with reinforcing the culture of your services organization. Hopefully, you have a team of ambitious, entrepreneurial individuals each focused on advancing their career as rapidly as they can. If you also have a well-defined structure of titles and roles that clearly shows how they fit together, it will motivate those individuals to rapidly gain a broad range of skills by getting onto the right projects.
For example, let’s say your company has a title and level called a Senior Consultant (Business), and to be a candidate for promotion to that level you need to have certain skills and capabilities, such as “the ability to effectively fill the roles of project manager, trainer, or senior business analyst.” This model will reinforce the behavior you want, which is for each individual to strive to be assigned to the projects that will grow their capabilities in each area. The net result is a more flexible team made up of individuals who are self-motivated to be assigned to new projects in a variety of roles rather than sitting comfortably on the bench.

3 Steps to Transitioning to a Better Model for Roles and Titles

The transition to a fully defined structure of project roles, titles, and levels can be done rapidly using the big bang (all at once) model, typically at the end of a year as part of your cycle of reviews and promotions.
1) Identify and Define
The first step is to determine the discrete roles required for each type of project you undertake, and to clearly label each.
2) Map Roles to Titles
The second step is to map the project roles to the formal titles and levels you use internally for HR purposes. The result is a matrix with rows that might look something like this:
Title                           Level     Typical Project Roles
Senior Consultant         4         Project Manager, Business Analyst, Product Specialist, Trainer
Note that there is not a one-for-one relationship between titles and roles. Each formal title and level will correspond to several roles that a person with that title may fill.
3) Map Individuals
The third and final step, of course, is to map the individuals into your formal structure of titles and levels, which requires a careful communication plan with very clear messaging and thoughtful discussions with the team members.
Implementing this model will have an immediate impact on utilization and on your team member’s attitudes. The shift to a model where they get to play multiple roles and steer their own careers through their project work will create a more dynamic work environment in which high performers thrive.

Do you agree a greater emphasis should be placed on roles rather than titles? How are roles and titles developed at your company?

Photo by: Paul B