Not My Job


I don’t want it to sound as though I am a continual complainer about today’s business environment and conduct. There are many aspects of it that I appreciate. It is just that I believe that it might be better if what has already been proven to be effective in the business environment were retained and combined with what the best of today has to offer instead of seemingly being discarded and replaced whole cloth. I also understand that despite what just about every media outlet reports and would like us to believe, that the business environment is still a difficult place and probably will be for some time to come. Despite all this and probably more, there is one trend that I have witnessed in the conduct of today’s business that I just don’t seem to be able to get my head around. I don’t understand how anyone can ever respond to a question, request or assignment with the words “It’s not my job.”



It seems to me that this phrase has been insidiously creeping into our business lexicon. I have mentioned in the past that it seemed that companies prized employees that had a breadth of experience in that they felt it enabled them to take on new roles and added responsibilities. The difficult business and economic times appears to have taught companies that instead of retaining the generalist who may be capable of performing a great many different functions very well and grow into a multi-dimensional business leader, they may now instead focus on the shorter term and opt for a specialist who may be highly proficient in one particular skill, to the exclusion of the others with somewhat less potential for leadership upside.



The equivalent comparison here would be looking at someone who competes in the decathlon, a ten discipline competition, and comparing them to a sprinter who only competes in the one hundred meter sprint. The winner of the decathlon is viewed as the best overall athlete, but today if you need someone to run one hundred meters, you will more than likely choose the sprinter. And tomorrow if you need someone to throw the javelin or clear the bar in the high jump you can replace the sprinter with someone else who better fills those specific needs then. As I said, a much shorter term approach to immediate needs.



I am drawing a corollary between the advent of this corporate preference for business specialists and the beginning of the “Not My Job” mentality. It seems only natural that if you were brought in for a single purpose that you might not be knowledgeable of or have the predilection to perform other jobs or assume other responsibilities. As an example, if you are brought in to sell, your single focus now is to get the customer order. It seems that profitability, margins, availability of product, functionality, deliverability, etc, are now reduced in your hierarchy of priorities. They are now someone else’s job. If the people responsible for those functions are not as good at their roles as you are at getting orders, it is quite probable that business profitability as well as customer satisfaction will suffer due to potentially too low prices and undeliverable commitments. However, there will probably be plenty of these somewhat difficult orders.



I have also discussed in the past the proliferation of the virtual office and being remotely located in the performance of your role. Prior to the advanced bandwidth and networking capabilities that we enjoy today, functions and businesses were usually collocated within a specific building, floor or area. This face to face interaction gave rise to business terms such as “efficiency” and “synergy”. People physically worked together. 



This also seemed to be a period of intense creativity and development. There were many magazine articles displaying pictures of people sleeping at their desks in the California Silicon Valley as they were driving to create their new businesses and business models. As we have evolved to a more “virtual” environment we seem to have possibly lost some of the synergy, productivity and interaction that drove many of the new ideas.



We may also be seeing the beginning of a corrective movement associated with the virtual office world. In February Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo Issued a directive that all virtual or remote employees in that company need to come into an office to work. She was worried about not only the creativity that was lost when people stopped physically working together, but also the productivity that was lost. We’ll see how this “virtual” reversal goes, but I find it very interesting that a technology and digital bellwether company like Yahoo, a company that was a leader in the new digital age has adopted such a contrary stance to virtual office working.




The corollary that I am drawing here is that psychologically it is easier to say things over the phone than it is to say them in person.  With the advent of virtual offices and conducting the preponderance of work either by phone or electronic media, we have made it in effect “easier” for people to say “Not My Job”. They get to say it over the phone instead of face to face.



Perhaps it was a different time, but I see it even today in that there seems to be more collaboration and less job responsibility deflection in a face to face meeting than in a conference call. A set of disembodied voices on a conference call do not seem to engender the same kind of commitment that is achieved when people are in the same room. An even greater level of commitment seems to be created when people leave the conference room and know they will need to continue to face their peers in the office area. It seems when you hang up the phone everyone is “gone”. It is easier to say “Not My Job” because you rarely if ever have to face them.




Perhaps it is also the advent of the more matrix oriented business structure that has given rise to the “Not My Job” growth. In the past general management or more hierarchical business structures, when a request was made if it was not already a given job responsibility, it was positioned as the addition of a new job responsibility. In today’s somewhat more matrix and consensus oriented business structures, where there is more functional specificity, as well as far more functional overlap, managers seem to be structurally encouraged to focus on only those activities that fit cleanly within their responsibility definitions.




Instead of having a business structure that promotes the addition and incrementing of new responsibilities, we now have one that encourages ever tighter focus on a specific set of responsibility definitions and processes. The result seems to be more and more “Not My Job” responses.




Despite what the typical business RACI matrix (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed) may state, leaders when asked take responsibility. It may not be in their job definition. It may not have been anything that they have done before in the organization. But when they are asked, or when they see a business or performance gap that needs to be filled, they step up. If the requirement is truly outside the bounds of their expertise, they don’t say it’s not their job. They take on the responsibility to find out who has the required expertise and see to it that they get the job done.




There is always a time and a place for pushing back on assignments, but in business now, if a job needs to get done it needs to be everyone’s job to see to it that the job gets done. I think if we heard more “I’ll do that job” and less “It’s not my job” we would make much better progress.

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