Signs that your people don't have the capacity for current and future roles

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Occupational Psychologist Memory Nguwi explains the tragedy of appointing people to levels beyond their capabilities. 

It has been established through research that 35 per cent of the people employed are in roles that require more capacity than current incumbents have. This alone should get you worried if you are a chief executive or a board member as it implies that a lot of value is being lost simply through the recruitment and training process. 

The model that I will use in this article as a reference for assessing employee capacity versus the level of job complexity is Jaques ‘level of work model. This model groups jobs into levels of work based on job complexity. Most executives fall into level four and five, which is equivalent to band F in the Patterson grading system.  Job grading places jobs into grades based on the content of the job. It does not look at the capacity of the individual to do the job and this is where the biggest challenge for companies is.

If you have placed people into roles based on job evaluation but not their capacity to handle the level of complexity required for the role, there is bound to be trouble.

When assessing individuals, one should first look at the individual’s assigned or current operating level. This the level the organisation decides that the individual should be operating at through job evaluation or other assessments.

The next stage is to look at the individuals’ Current Actual Capability (CAC), which is the individual’s capacity to function effectively in their current operating level. This is a function of their capacity based on their level of cognitive power, personality, experience, skilled job knowledge, competencies and motivation.   One could go a step further to assess Current Potential Capability(CPC), which is the maximum level at which a person could currently work, provided that optimum opportunities and conditions are there, even though the person did not have past opportunities to acquire necessary skilled knowledge. This sets the person’s current level of work ceiling for any role.

After that assessment, one may find that a person whose current operating level is a four may actually have their current actual capability at level two. Such a mismatch is a disaster for any organisation in general and catastrophic for those being managed by such an individual. In some instances, you find an individual whose current operating level is level four but with a current actual capacity at level five and current potential capability at level six.  This means the individual has a capacity way beyond that of those that are managing them. Such individuals may not stay with the organisation for a long period as they are likely to feel constrained. 

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Hire people for roles that match capability

The biggest challenge for having people operating beyond their current actual capability is that they tend to bring the job down to a level they are comfortable at. A chief executive whose assigned operating level is a five will reduce that to a three if that is the ceiling of their current potential.  This is where you find executive leaders who, instead of being strategic and focusing on the future of the business, become too focused on operations. They will be busy being involved in operational decisions that are not at their assigned level. Again, such a scenario can be disastrous for business. 

Another area where capacity issues have even worse consequences is when board members who, for example, are level three in terms of capacity but are expected to supervise a level five chief executive.  These board members will bring the role down to level three and are likely to create a lot of conflict with the CEO and other senior executives. 

They become too operational and will not be able to properly oversee the work of the executive leadership team because they become preoccupied with work meant for people two levels below that of the executive leadership. That is the tragedy of appointing people to levels higher than their capability. 

The Assumption in the level of work is that work should always be supervised by people who are at least a level above the work they are supervising. However, due to faulty organisational structures, this is not always the case.  The result is gross inefficiencies in the organisational structures. The is plenty of evidence in state enterprises and some private organisations where people of inferior capability to the CE are appointed to as Board members thereby creating chaos in these Boards.

The best way to go is for the business to do an assessment of each individual employee’s current actual capability versus current level or role and also future roles. This gives an organisation a feel on how damaged the structure in operation is.  Most of the business failures and chaos we are witnessing in this market boils down to a mismatch between role levels and individual capacity of incumbents. 

Memory Nguwi is an occupational psychologist, data scientist, speaker, and managing consultant at Industrial Psychology Consultants (Pvt) Ltd, a management and human resources consulting firm.

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