“. . . Organization design challenges arise when we mistake job titles for roles. If a role is the candy, the job title is the candy wrapper. . .” – Congruence: The Playmaker's Guide to High Value Companies
I assume you want to hire people who are better at DOING the work rather than ones who are just good at GETTING the job.
I still remember the first time someone told me to "fake it till you make it.” A 20-something shared their perspective on career progression in a very personal conversation. Unconciuously, it changed how I thought about the person.
I was 30. I had somehow made it through 13 years in America without ever noticing that phrase. I didn’t know if the whole world changed or my ecosystem changed.
It's just not how people thought in the world I came from. I hope to stay naive enough to believe that the correct choice is to actually get better at the things we want to do and be recognized for. We do the hard work to learn new things, do it well enough until we are good at it, and people will notice if we are creating value. [Yes, without getting taken advantage of].
With so many people looking for jobs and massive shifts in foundational technology capabilities, understanding a simple idea can help us hire well: Role vs. Job Titles.
✅ Roles articulate what a person actually does to create value.
🛑 Job titles are vague approximations of what people think they do.
There is a massive difference between the two.
🛑 An organization designed and staffed with a collection of “jobs” will never be inherently congruent.
✅ Roles ensure that the people we involve in the company are chosen based on a well-designed value flow and utilize capital optimally.
I am sharing an extract from Congruence about the fallacy of relying on Job Titles.
As you think about your organizations, stop focusing on the candy wrapper “job titles” to hire based on past employers and titles.
Start Moneyballing and focus on the incentives, decisions, and actions that create value in the context of the specific company. i.e. Roles.
John Oommen is an electrical engineer turned company-level evolution architect who partners with private company investors and middle-market CEOs to mature and transform portfolio companies. He is the author of Congruence: The Playmaker's Guide to High Value Companies, creator of the underlying proprietary Congruence mindset, model, and method, and pioneer of the Playmaker Capability, which is a must-have value injection mechanism that dovetails purpose, strategy, and operations.
Over more than two decades, John has led company-level transformations, M&A integrations, and operational turnarounds across dozens of mid-market, VC and PE-backed, and Fortune 100 companies, including General Electric, Accenture, Blue Ridge Partners, and Capital One, as well as enterprise clients like Emerson, Ferguson, Cox, Avaya, and Nortek, alongside numerous mid-market companies. He specializes in addressing business-to-business market problems spanning industrial manufacturing, distribution, technology, and tech-enabled services. John holds an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, is a certified Six Sigma Black Belt, and is based in Chicago.
