Assuming you have been employed at full capacity in your previous work, adding a time element to your resume’s bullet points is one of the best ways to demonstrate your level of capability, and there is plenty of research to back up my assertion.? Below is the question and my response:

“I get calls on my resume but they aren?t for the right level job. What am I doing wrong?”

What Adds to the Weight of a Role?
One of the key items that adds weight to a role is time (within managerial hierarchies – not necessarily associations or independent consulting roles).? Any given type of work can exist at a variety of levels.??For example, sales work can range from “Do you want fries with that?” to determining whether a potential market overseas is viable.

You Know This in Your Gut
If the longest deliverable in your role is 2 months, your role is fundamentally different than one that carries a longest deliverable of 2 years. So when describing your experience, specifically state some of your longest term deliverables as a way of indicating the level of complexity you can handle.

Amazing Research Correlations
Research by Elliott Jaques, validated at least six times, has shown that time span of discretion (aka the length of the longest task in a role) is the king kong indicator of what people will say is felt-fair pay for a particular role. I believe 30 potential variables were evaluated and the correlations between time span and felt fair pay ranged between +0.84 and +0.95.

Another Look at the Same Issue from Requisite Reading
This same phenomenon is why your former salary is a proxy for your ability, and recruiters and prospective employers are always curious about it.? My colleague Forrest Christian details this in his blog post, Why Recession Grads Make Less Over Time.

This Doesn’t Help the Underemployed
Unfortunately, if you have been underemployed, time spans and former salaries are going to work against you, since they reflect the level of capability you’ve been in a position to exercise, not your potential capability.? Behavioral-based interviewing has this same issue.

What does your resume say about you?

I’m OK. You’re OK.? Let’s fix the system.

May God bless those who have been put on this earth to teach and to those who generously impart their gifts without concern toward personal gain or status. I live in the prosperous shadow of such people and am honored to be counted among their students. Thank you.

Now, on to my Thanksgiving Post…

What Are Your Employees Thankful For?? Keeping Employees Engaged is Simple
Organizations diligently work to keep their employees engaged and productive.? Gifts and perks are great, but my list of the minimum criteria for engagement is short and clear.? If your employees cannot be thankful for the following items, skip the fruit basket this year and get to work on your making managerial leadership system requisite.

-A clear picture of their role, and clear assignments.

-A role matched to their current cognitive capability level.

-Accountability matched with requisite authority.

-A manager who adds value to their thinking. (aka has cognitive capacity one level higher than the employee)

-Explicitly defined role relationships with others as arranged by their manager. Employees shouldn’t be left to beg or manipulate others to get their work done. (For example, if A and B disagree, who decides? If A needs services from B, what is B’s obligation to A? If A recommends something to B, must B do it or can B choose to decline idea?)

-Felt fair pay.

I’m OK. You’re OK. Let’s fix the system.

Parole Agent Work is Level Two Work
If you follow my blog, you know that work exists in levels, and we can classify roles by work level.? If a parole agent’s job involves sorting information to identify relevant clues and then adding clues together to draw conclusions, then it is level two work.

Level Two Work Calls for Level Two Capability
If we add to that the fact that people’s problem solving capability occurs in increasingly complex levels, we know that in order to be competent in a parole officer role, one would need at least level two capability.

Why Would Someone Ignore Clues that Could Save a Life?
Finally, because I believe people are wired to work and want to contribute at work, I have to ask myself, why would a parole officer IGNORE clues?? I daresay that?maybe they weren’t?ignored, but rather they were not RECOGNIZED as clues in the first place.? This phenomenon would occur if the state of California had level-one capable officers employed in level two roles.

Where is the System Broken?
So is the recruiting system designed to screen specifically for level-two capability?? If not, you might expect something like this tragedy to?occur.? Additionally, we have to ask is the system set up to provide level-two felt-fair compensation for this role?? You really do get what you pay for, and level-one pay will draw level-one capable people, who will not be competent in a parole officer role.? Again, knowing this, we could predict this type of tragedy.

Just another example of how understanding work levels could change the world and save lives.? I’m OK.? You’re OK. Let’s fix the system.

My colleague, Craig Tamlin,?with PeopleFit Australasia has written an article proposing non-commission based sales compensation.? Read his article here.

I’m OK.? You’re OK.? What do you think?? Do sales people rate another system?

The following is part thee of a three-part post on Felt Fair Compensation. ?See Part 1 and Part 2 here.

This Felt Fair Pay series was authored by my colleague, Barry Deane of PeopleFit Australasia.? My hat is off to him for addressing the topic so thoroughly and for backing it with historical data and research citations.

Key Features
Remunerations systems based on the Requisite Organization body of work have the following key features:

• Organizational levels are assigned to specific and objectively-defined ?levels of work?
• Specific remuneration limits are assigned to each organizational level.
• The spread of remuneration within a level (from ?entry level? to ?fully effective?) is set at 1:2 (i.e. a multiple of 2 from bottom to top)
• There is no crossing of the level boundaries in assigning remuneration i.e. a the top remuneration for a Level 2 role marks the bottom of remuneration for a Level 3 role
• Variation of remuneration for people in roles within a work level is focused on ?progression through the work of the role? i.e. from ?entry level? to ?fully capable?. Progression itself is determined through the judgement of the immediate manager in relation to the employee?s ?performance effectiveness?.
• Internal system parities and external (i.e. market) parities are dealt with through separate but linked processes

Key Behavioural Principles
These features reflect two behavioural principles of ?felt fairness?:

1. People do/will acknowledge that it is fair that employees who do more complex work deserve to get paid significantly more than people doing less complex work. Note: I said, ?significantly? not excessively) ? and the significant difference is quantified in the RO body of work
2. People acknowledge that those who work more effectively (i.e. in relation to doing work of the same complexity) should be ?differentially? rewarded. Perhaps this principle is better appreciated by the implication of this principle that those who do not work effectively should not be rewarded as much as those who do.

Key Texts
A few key texts which deal with felt-fair pay in some detail are:

• A General Theory of Bureaucracy, (noted above)
• Executive Leadership, Elliott Jaques and Stephen D Clement (1991 – 2002), Cason Hall & Co, USA
• Social Power and the CEO, Elliott Jaques (2002), Quorum Books, USA
• Requisite Organization, Elliott Jaques (1987 – 1998), Cason Hall & Co, USA

And RO in Australia (part story):

• The Line in the Sand, J.T.Ludeke QC (1996), Wilkinson Books, Australia

One Part of a Meta Requisite Organization Model
Having provided a few notes on the principle of ?felt fair pay?, I need to caution that this cannot be considered or deployed as a stand-alone principle.? There are a number of other precursor principles and practices relating to organizational design and managerial practice which must be understood and established.? I have alluded to some of these above (e.g. organizational stratification by ?levels of work?, managerial assessment of ?performance effectiveness?). Unfortunately, space does not permit me to delve into these matters here so I refer readers to the body of work that I have drawn attention to above (i.e. Requisite Organization) for further study.

This is the third in a series of three guest posts on Felt Fair Compensation by Barry Deane.

The following is part two of a three-part post on Felt Fair Compensation.??See Part 1 here.

This Felt Fair Pay series was authored by my colleague, Barry Deane of PeopleFit Australasia. My hat is off to him for addressing the topic so thoroughly and for backing it with historical data and research citations.

Over 60 Years of Research
Lord Wilfred Brown and Dr. Elliott Jaques investigated this matter (among other organisational and leadership matters) as part of an extensive piece of workplace-based research known as the Glacier Project (UK 1948 to circa 1976). The following quotation is instructive, especially since it was written over 30 years ago:

?If the problem of differential payment is as critical an issue as experience would suggest, what then is to be done? A possible lead has been provided by the curious finding which first suggested that level of work might be measurable in terms of time-span of discretion; namely, that for each time-span level there is a corresponding level of pay felt by employed persons to be fair.

In work over a period of some twenty years in the Glacier Metal Company a correlation of about 0.90 has been found between time-span and felt-fair pay, for all types of work ? manual, technical, managerial, research, sales, finance, etc. In a study at the headquarters of Honeywell Corporation in Minneapolis, U.S.A., Richardson found a correlation of 0.86 for managerial and staff personnel in manufacturing, sales and research. He further found by means of regression analysis that time-span explained some 75% of the variation in felt-fair pay, as compared with actual pay (10%), and 28 other variables, none of which accounted for more than 1.5% of the variation. There is further support for the validity and reliability of these studies in work in Holland and in Canada, and in less systemic and unpublished testing in a number of other countries besides.?

-Elliott Jaques (1976, ?77, ?81, ?83) A General Theory of Bureaucracy, Heinemann UK

The ?time-span levels? referred to above concerns the recognition/discovery of levels of complexity of work, a necessary construct informing the layering of organisations i.e. what is the nature of the work to be done by the organisation and how many levels of management should there be to achieve the work.

The Glacier project is well documented.? Felt-fair pay is also well documented.

Requisite Organization – The Meta Model
The whole body of work of which felt-fair pay is a component is now known as Requisite Organization (RO). This body of work was introduced into Australia late in the 1970s by Sir Roderick Carnegie, then CEO of CRA Ltd (now Rio Tinto).

Requisite Organization Library
There is a large amount of academic and other professional documentation of the CRA experience (and others) and RO, much of which is listed in an extensive bibliography published by the Global Organization Design Society, a not-for-profit organisation based in Toronto Canada. You can download this bibliography free from GO?s website.

More tomorrow…

Stop by tomorrow for the third post in this guest series on Requisite Felt Fair Compensation by Barry Deane.

The following is part one of a three-part post on Felt Fair Compensation.?

This Felt Fair Pay series was authored by my colleague, Barry Deane of PeopleFit Australasia.? My hat is off to him for addressing the topic so thoroughly and for backing it with historical data and research citations.

Paying Executives More For Less?
Interest in what is seen as excessive executive pay, has been gathering over a number of years now ? at least ten years. The current financial melt-down provides emphasis as attempts are made to reconcile excesses of pay with business results.

Could We Ever Agree on Fair Pay?
Watching this game of executive justification for excess (e.g. ?My job is really, really big, and I deserve as much as I can get.?) being met by public anxiety (?It sure seems a lot, but then maybe I couldn?t do such a really big job, or maybe I?m just envious?), one could be forgiven for thinking that the question, ?What is fair pay?? cannot possibly be answered.

We Already Have
The ?fact? is that work to address this question has already been done – and the key determinants of ?felt fair pay? have been identified. At the very least one might say that there is compelling science-based evidence that this question has been answered substantially.

An Evidence-Based Way to Pay?
The more troubling question to me is why it is that in all of the current public debate on this subject, there appears to be no expectation that board directors, legislators and policy makers must find and use an objective, evidence-based link between the work being done and the assignment of pay for that work?

Can We PROVE Executive Pay is Excessive?
The presence of significant and persistent community outrage about executive pay is predicted by the substantial, science-based field work that has already been done. The work also suggests that such (predictable) outrage is founded in deep feelings about fairness and justice. Surely it is important (now more than ever) for us to know whether such feelings are justified and, if they are, what might underpin them? It is a fact that the work that has been done points decisively to such a community-based idea about fair pay and to the key determinants for achieving that.

More on this tomorrow…

Come back tomorrow and Thursday for Parts?2 and 3 of this guest series written by Barry Deane.

Background Reading On Felt Fair Compensation
Felt Fair Compensation is based upon the work of the late Dr. Elliott Jaques and his meta-model, Requisite Organization.? If you would like to do some background reading prior to my talking about implementation, try these Mission Minded Management posts:

• If We Really Understood Work, Compensation Would be a No Brainer
• How the Compensation Industry Machine Silenced a Circumventor – A True Story
• Felt Fair Compensation – She Said What?
• CEO Pay – A Friday Not So Funny
• Using Peer Groups to Set CEO Compensation? Keep Good Company
• Face to the Customer Organization Design – A Critical Decision. Farewell to Circuit City

Felt Fair Pay Basic Concepts

1. Humans have an intuitive sense of fair compensation for the work they are doing.
2. Multiple research studies (over time, over the globe) have shown there is a direct correlation between level of work of a role and the compensation felt to be fair for?that role.? (As a bonus idea, level of work is tied to time.)
3. Felt Fair Compensation consists of a differential pay system based upon science-based work levels.? (See differential table below.)

Felt Fair Pay Implementation
Once you understand work levels, implementing a Felt Fair Compensation system is relatively straightforward.

1. Determine the requisite level of work of each role within your organization.
2. Research and establish role comparables for your industry and market and their corresponding pay.
3. Create your pay strategy.? i.e.? Will we pay at, below, or above the average?
4. Put dollar figures to the differentials by determining the dollar value of X, which falls at the break point between level 2 and 3.
5. Further stratify your compensation?by creating work bands and pay steps within each level.

That is it!? It’s not difficult to understand, but it is not an easy thing to do for a variety of reasons.? I’m OK.? You’re OK.? Let’s fix the compensation system!

Sample Felt Fair Pay Differentials Table

Equitable Differential Pay

?Questions?? Are you being paid fairly for the work you are being asked to do?

Instead of Measuring Outputs, Let’s Judge Effectiveness
Instead, managers must judge the effectiveness of their employees.??This is?a?huge part of?what we pay managers to do.??Try as we might, we cannot measure effectiveness.? It must be a judgment.? One piece of this judgment?should be?performance, but “performance” never tells the whole story.? One must assess performance in light of circumstances.

Pay for Performance in Medicine Does Not Drive Quality – Ripped from the Headlines
CHICAGO (Reuters) ? “Dangling a financial carrot in front of doctors as a way to improve health quality has changed the way some doctors practice medicine, but has yet to significantly improve quality and may be interfering with doctor-patient relationships, researchers said on Tuesday.”

“Physician groups are responding to pay-for-performance programs by making practice changes and altering how they compensate physicians to reward quality, but health plans and purchasers say that those investments are not yet translating into substantial gains in quality,” said Cheryl Damberg, a senior policy researcher at RAND, whose study appears in the journal Health Affairs.

Do We As Patients Want This?
Within a pay for performance medical system,?we?can all predict that there will be times and places where a physician’s doing the right thing for us as a patient will mean their taking a financial hit.? I hope and pray their personal character will overrule their desire for money, but shame on this system for making them choose!

I’m OK.? You’re OK.? Let’s fix the system.

A Solid Relationship

Shifting from Work Level 2 Face to Customer to Level 1
A few years back, I remember hearing that a struggling Circuit City was slashing the pay of its salespeople.? Looking through my Requisite Work Levels goggles, I knew this meant that they were also unwittingly reducing the work level capability of their salespeople – their face to the customer.? I remember thinking, there goes Circuit City.

Felt Fair Pay
Because of the felt fair pay phenonmenon and its relationship to work level capability, when you reduce pay, you reduce the work level of your candidate pool.? Simply put, the more you pay, the higher the cognitive level of your candidate pool.? There are times and places where a level 1 face to the customer is appropriate, but shifting backwards is dangerous.

How Does This Feel to Customers?
Anecdotal evidence says Circuit City had been employing mostly level two capable people.? This means they were capable of picking up MULTIPLE bits and pieces of information from their customers,?DRAWING CONCLUSIONS?and offering products that ALIGNED with their customers’ needs.

Analysis Burden Shifted to Customer
When Circuit City reduced their pay, they began attracting level one capable people who follow procedures and consider bits of information INDEPENDENTLY.? Essentially, the analysis burden?was shifted to the customer.? For someone like me who is not electronics savvy, I need a salesperson to help me with my analysis.? Suddenly, I found it frustrating to shop at Circuit City because I had grown to expect something else.

Incidentally, if you’ve noticed a shift in the level of service you receive from Home Depot these days.? They walked this same pathway.

The Unintended Consequences of Cutting Pay – It’s About Structure!
Cutting the pay of your organization’s face to the customer is not just about numbers!!!? It is a huge strategic decision.? That is why organization design must be an executive level leadership accountability.

Level Shifting
Generally, deciding to increase the level of your face to customer can give you a competitive edge and pleasantly surprised customers, but it will increase your payroll costs.? Lowering the level of your face to the customer will disappoint your customer and drive him away, but you will have lower payroll costs.?

Farewell, my estranged friend, Circuit City.? I’m OK.? You’re OK.? Let’s fix the system.

Have You Experienced This Phenomenon?
What other companies have recently lowered the pay of their front line?? Have you noticed a shift in the level of service you receive from them?