Staff capacity key to success
IT has been established through research that 35% of the people employed are in roles that require more capacity than incumbents have.
is alone should get you worried if you are a CE or a board member. is implies that a lot of value is being lost in several organisations.
e model that is used to assess employee capacity versus the level of job complexity is Jaques “level of work model”. is model groups jobs into levels of work based on job complexity.
Most CEOs and other executives in the country would fall into Level 4 and 5. is is equivalent to band F in Patterson grading. Job grading places jobs into grades based on the content of the job. It does not look at the capacity of the individual to do the job.
is is where the biggest challenge for companies is. You have placed people into roles based on job evaluation, but not their capacity to handle the level of complexity required for the role.
When assessing an individual’s capability, we first look at the individual’s assigned or current operating level. is is the level the organisation decides the individual should operate at through job evaluation or other assessments. e individual has no choice but to go into that assigned role.
e next stage is to look at the individuals’ current actual capability (CAC). What is the individual’s capacity to function effectively in their current operating level? is is a function of their capacity based on their level of cognitive power, personality, experience, skilled job knowledge, competencies and motivation.
You can go a step further to assess current potential capability(CPC) — the maximum level at which a person could currently work, provided that optimum opportunities and conditions are there, even though the person did not have past opportunities to acquire necessary skilled knowledge. is sets the person’s current level of work ceiling for any or every type of work.
After the assessment, you may find that a person whose current operating level is a 4 may have their current actual capability at level 2. Such a mismatch is a disaster for the organisation in general and catastrophic for those being managed by such an individual.
In some instances, you get an individual whose current operating level is level 4, but their current actual capacity is level 5 and their current potential capability is a 6.
is means the individual has the capacity way ahead of those managing them. Such individuals may or may not stay long as they are likely to feel they are being constrained in the way they operate.
e biggest challenge for having people operating beyond their current actual capability is that they tend to bring the job down to a level they are comfortable with.
As an example, a CE whose assigned operating level may be level 5, can bring down that job to level 3, if their actual current potential is level 3. is is where you find a CE, instead of being strategic and focusing on the future of the business, becoming too operational. ey will be busy with operational decisions that are not at their assigned level. Again such a scenario would be disastrous for your business.
Another area where capacity issues have even worse consequences is when board members who are, for example, level 3 in terms of capacity, are expected to supervise a level 5 CE.
ese board members will bring the role down to level 3 and are likely to create a lot of conflict with the CE and other senior executives. ey become so operational, hence chaos. at is the tragedy of appointing people to levels higher than their capability.
e assumption in the level of work is that roles should always be supervised by people who are at least a level higher than the work they are supervising.
However, due to faulty organisational structures, this is not always the case. e result is gross inefficiencies. ere is plenty of evidence in state enterprises and some private organisations where people of inferior capability to the CE are appointed as board members, resulting in chaotic management of such entities.
e best way to go is for the business to assess each employee’s current actual capability versus current level or role and also future roles. is gives an organisation a feel of how damaged the structure in operation is. Most of the business failures and chaos we are witnessing in this market boils down to the mismatch between role levels and the capacity of incumbents.
Nguwi is an occupational psychologist, data scientist, speaker and managing consultant at Industrial Psychology Consultants (Pvt) Ltd, a management and human resources consulting firm. — mnguwi@ipcconsultants.com or websites https://www.thehumancapitalhub.com/ and www.ipcconsultants.com.