Most careers are built on a widely -held assumption: climb the ladder, earn the title, wait for the promotion. But what if that traditional model no longer leads to reliable growth?
HR researcher and author Josh Bersin explains why the traditional idea of a job is outdated and how breaking free from it unlocks growth for both individuals and organizations.
JOSH BERSIN: Every human being makes the job different. Even if you're working in a restaurant serving hamburgers in a very repeatable kind of a fashion, your style, your way of talking to them, your way of presenting the food is unique to you, and you make it what you've learned is the way to do it the best. There's a very dated, limited view of management going back to the industrial age where we have a job, and you, as a human, are the replaceable part, and the job is the part that remains. And we will swap people in and out of that job, the way that job is defined. And I swear to God, my life was all about that kind of a career for the first twenty years of my life. We had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of books written in the 1960s and the 1970s and 1980s based on this job-centric model of management. But I know from the research that I've done in the companies I've worked with, the more you get away from this idea that I have this box around me, and I have to work inside the box, the higher-performing company you're going to have.
My name is Josh Bersin. I'm a researcher and an industry analyst and consultant in human resources. I've been doing this for close to thirty years. I have written several books, the most recent book being, "Irresistible, The Seven Secrets of the World's Most Enduring, Employee-Focused Organizations."
The idea of a job goes back to very old industrial companies where we had management and labor. The managers decided what to do, and the labor did the work. Going back to the early days of Frederick Taylor, they would take apart the manufacturing of steel or other things, break them into component parts because the industrial engineers had mathematically proven we could optimize the whole by specializing a person in each part. And the old model of this still exists in every single company, every HR practice, every pay practice, and recruiting, where we have a job. And the job has a title. It has a level. It has a pay band. It has required capabilities and certifications and maybe educational credentials. Then it has responsibilities.
This job architecture, job-centric work creates lots and lots of problems. The typical behavior in a job-centric company is, "Well, that's not my job, so I'm not sure if I should do it or not because it's actually somebody else's job." It gets in the way of paying somebody who's young, but very, very highly capable because they're lower in the hierarchy than someone who has a higher-level job. The director job has a different pay than the individual job, even though the individual may be adding more value than the director, but there's no way to pay them. It gets in the way of moving people around. Oftentimes, companies will try to move people from this business to this business when this is shrinking and this is growing, And people say, "Well, I'm not going to take that job unless it's a promotion. I don't feel qualified to do that job. I wasn't trained to do that job." There's lots of fear and uncertainty and reward systems that create brittle fragility in the company when we spend too much time thinking about what our job is.
In reality, of course, as you know, every human being is different, every individual, even in the same job, is different. And so we need to kind of relax that job-centric structure in every possible way in HR, in particular, to allow these more agile organizations to flourish. Now that's not easy. Let me just, you know, warn you. All the HR software, all the pay models, all of the career and progression models, all the 9-box grids are based on this job-centric model of management. I'm not saying we still don't have job titles and levels. That stuff's probably going to be around forever. But we have to operate beyond that in the work that we do, and not let that get in the way of solving the problems and addressing the opportunities that we have in our companies.
The simplest, most powerful way to reinforce work, not jobs is to ask people to do something different. Ask people to work on a developmental assignment. Give them a special project. Give them a rotation. Ask them what they're interested in doing outside of the work they're doing now, and then let them do that. So they are not forced to do the same thing over and over and over again. They still might have the responsibility of their primary job, but all of a sudden, you'll realize that this new sense of energy and learning has come into this individual when they get to do something new. And the more you do that, the faster it goes around, and there's more agility in the organization.
For example, in our company, we have close to fifty people. Everybody does everything. Everybody talks to customers. Everybody works on research. People come together and work on our conference because we need them to do different things. And so they end up having very rich, rewarding developmental careers because we have the ability and sort of the DNA of asking people to do things outside of their primary responsibility. That's a lot easier than it sounds, but that's really what it comes down to.
Every human being from the day you're born is learning. And so when you go to work and you're doing the same thing over and over again, and you're not learning, you get this sense of stasis that, you know, I'm not going anywhere and, you know, maybe I'll just retire in this job and maybe that'll be the end of that. That's not good for the company, and that's not good for the individual. So we have to find ways in the company to reward growth without waiting for that promotion.
I remember several times in my career where I would go to my boss and say, "I'm this level, what is it going to take for me to get to the next level?" And I remember one time my boss said to me, "You just need to wait. It takes at least two years." I remember thinking to myself, "That's ridiculous. Why does it take two years?" And he would say, "Because that's the way we do it around here." I was never very good at politics, but I've had an incredibly enriching, successful, fulfilling career in many, many ways and grown in so many ways. The fact that I'm even here doing this video for you is because my career was based on personal, professional growth all the time. And I was lucky enough to have companies that allowed me to do that, or I left the company, went to another one, at times, to get the development and growth that I needed.
The one thing I would say that I've learned over the twenty-five, thirty years that I've been doing this, spending a lot of time in HR is a massive respect for the culture and organizational dynamics of high-performing companies. And if you, as a leader or as an individual or as an HR person, can think systemically about the people issues that are creating the business issues that you're dealing with, you will always be a high performer because every business problem is, at its core, a people problem. And I've learned that again and again and again. And so that is the secret that I would like to share with those of you that are listening.
