How to Match People to Roles – It’s Not Just about Personality

By Michelle Malay Carter on March 17, 2009 

Let\'s match people to roles.

“It is as if we are blessed with elegant tiles for a mosaic but have no design.? There are great ideas, insightful bits, and clever pieces but no artist with a plan for turning the assortment into an elegant, integrated picture.”

–Beck and Cowan, Spiral Dynamics

What is Work?
Work is the exercising of judgment and discretion in making decisions in carrying out goal directed activities.? Work occurs at discreet levels of complexity that can be measured.

Human Capability to Do Work
Cognitive capacity is one’s ability to organize, group and extrapolate information in order to solve problems.? The higher one’s cognitive capacity, the more complexity an issue one is able to exercise judgment about.? In layman’s terms, you might call it mental bandwidth, raw talent, or problem solving capability.? Elliott Jaques, who discovered this phenomenon and built the meta-model Requisite Organization, called it complexity of information processing.

Matching People to Work
There is a one for one correspondence between the level of work in a role, and levels of cognitive complexity.? Hence, at any given time in a person’s life, s/he is suited to work at a specific level within an organization.? We all mature in cognitive capacity over the course of our lives.? Mismatching people to roles causes dysfunction.

Let’s?Create a Collective Understanding
If we could create a collective understanding around these three points, we could solve a lot of organizational misery.

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

Have you ever been mismatched to a role in terms of cognitive capacity?? How did it feel?

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Filed Under Organization Design, Requisite Organization, Talent Management, Work Levels

Comments

4 Responses to “How to Match People to Roles – It’s Not Just about Personality”

  1. Chris Young on March 22nd, 2009 11:06 pm

    Great post Michelle – While I will always insist that personality plays an important role in the job matching process, it is critical that one does not overlook cognitive ability. I find this especially important in avoiding placing candidates in positions that they are “over qualified” and will eventually feel stale and unchallenged.

    I’ve shared your post with my readers in my weekly Rainmaker ‘Fab Five’ blog picks of the week (found here: http://www.maximizepossibility.com/employee_retention/2009/03/the-rainmaker-fab-five-blog-picks-of-the-week-3.html) to remind them to look beyond personality when looking for the right employee for the job.

    Be well Michelle and thanks for sharing this!

  2. Michelle Malay Carter on March 23rd, 2009 7:31 am

    Hi Chris,

    Thanks for the mention. I agree that personality and temperament are extremely important, as we cannot sustain that which is not “natural”. My beef is that organizations seem to focus on it and knowledge and skills to the exclusion of cognitive capacity.

    Regards,

    Michelle

  3. Daniel Kaufman on October 22nd, 2009 3:40 pm

    I agree with Chris though I would add that not only do you not want overqualified people in jobs but we also don’t want underqualified folks in jobs either. It’s not good for an org when people are “in over their heads”

    D

  4. Michelle Malay Carter on October 23rd, 2009 12:08 pm

    Hi Daniel,

    Thanks for the comment. What you say is true, but interestingly, my experience is that overqualified people tend to wreak more havoc, more quickly than those over their heads. The overqualified have more time!

    Michelle