Job descriptions (part 3)

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There is a big difference between a job description and a policy. My mentor says it’s always easier to create policy than to deal with a person directly. Policies are simply rules. They enable us to set clear-cut boundaries, but they don’t encourage ownership or thought. Rules only require obedience.

Job descriptions, however, deal with things that are expected of our volunteers or employees. They establish boundaries, and enable us to evaluate a person’s performance against a set of clear expectations. They should also encourage initiative. They should empower people to do more than just cross off one more thing from their “To do list.”

Policy says, “Answer the phone like this: ‘Thank you for calling Perrin Ministries. How may I help you?’”

A job description goes more like this: “We expect our volunteers/employees to handle all of our customers respectfully, to have a positive, can-do attitude and a pleasant demeanor.” This encourages the volunteer/employee to be creative in their implementation of the expectation.
Sometimes it is necessary to create policy – especially the case of a recurring problem. This shows a lack of clear communication on our part. But this should be the exception, not the rule.

Job descriptions (part 2)

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Job descriptions enable us to share our expectations with those we lead. And we are able to do this in a way that is non-threatening. We are simply letting the employee know what we expect from them, and setting boundaries.

And when they fail to meet the agreed-upon expectations, it gives us a legitimate way to bring confrontation or correction, if necessary. We can bring them back to the job description and show them how they didn’t meet the necessary expectations. And we can do so in a respectful, relational way.

We need to remember the goal of confrontation: the restoration of relationship. When one team member fails to accomplish a necessary task, the entire team suffers. This creates stress and strain on working and interpersonal relationships. Confrontation, when done correctly, allows us to restore these relationships to more than just a functional level.

Job descriptions (part 1)

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While I was at a conference today, I had an interesting conversation with a lady about her company. She owns a music school and has recently started having to hire employees. She doesn’t have much experience with people management, so she asked me a few questions. One of them had to do with how close she should be to her employees.

She is a people person so, naturally, she enjoys relationship building. And she has an employee that has used that as an excuse to not respect her as the boss. It’s not that the employee is evil… it’s just that this other person didn’t follow through on an assigned task and it left the owner looking unprepared, and very frustrated.

When she asked me what she could do, I encouraged her to spell out her expectations for each employee and position – basically, I encouraged her to come up with job descriptions for each employee.