The right person doing the right thing.

Many hats is right at the start

Most companies begin with the same person doing a great many different things, and that’s the right way to do it at that point. With six or eight people there simply isn’t enough of any single task to fill a whole role, and whoever is quick and willing just takes what comes up. A company that split the work into clean roles at that stage would get slower without getting better at anything.

What causes trouble is that the division of labour rarely gets another pass as the company grows. There are more people, each task gets heavier on its own, and the roles still look the way they did when everyone sat in the same room. Somewhere around there the question changes character, from who has the time to what conditions the new organisation has actually been given. If you grow from ten to thirty without ever sitting down to redraw who owns what, then in all likelihood at least one role is still carrying pieces that landed there when you were eight people.

How wrong placement happens

Few roles are designed from the outset. Most have grown, often around a person who happened to be the one who could do it when something needed doing, and then it’s been added to one piece at a time over a few years.

The result is roles made up of three or four different kinds of work that demand completely different things of the same person. Someone is meant to sell in the morning, keep the finances in order in the afternoon and lead two colleagues in between, and it’s hardly strange that one of the three suffers.

What makes it hard to see is that the person is usually genuinely good at at least one of the parts. Precisely because of that, it gets read as a performance problem instead of a placement problem.

When the mandate drifts

In a customer delivery, the roles are mostly written down. Someone sells, someone is responsible for delivery, and someone is part of the delivery itself. What makes it drift anyway is that the person responsible for delivery would quite like a mandate in how the quote and the contract are written, and the salesperson would quite like to have views on how the delivery should be set up.

It gets harder the more skilled the people involved are. Someone who’s really good in their own area carries a reasonable confidence in their own judgement, and that confidence follows them into adjacent questions where they know a fair amount but far from everything. It’s related to what Kruger and Dunning described, that whoever knows least about an area has the hardest time seeing how much is missing, with the difference that here the person is genuinely skilled, just at something else. It also means the people around them hold back from disagreeing, since they are right so often.

What gets lost in a negotiation

An experienced salesperson has built up a craft over years. Where you start from, where the other side probably starts from, what your walk-aways are and what theirs might be, and in what order the questions should be raised. There’s a give and take to be worked through, and done properly the result is usually good for both parties, meaning both are satisfied when they sign.

If the negotiation instead runs through someone who’s skilled at delivery but unaccustomed to the process itself, it tends to end with only one party satisfied. That’s the kind of deal that comes back as a problem later on, often during delivery and often with the person who wasn’t at the table.

Can and want are two questions

Before you replace anyone, it’s worth separating whether the person can’t manage the task and whether the person doesn’t want it. From the outside they look deceptively alike, in the form of late work and avoidance, but they call for completely different remedies.

Someone who can but doesn’t want to isn’t helped by another training course, they’re helped by someone asking why, and the answer usually has to do with the task not belonging in that role. Someone who wants to but can’t isn’t helped by more encouragement, they’re helped by time alongside someone who already does it.

Mix the two up and you’ll usually make the expensive mistake, sending the unwilling one on a course and cheering on the inexperienced one. The skill and will matrix is exactly this laid out in four boxes, and it’s useful just as long as you’re honest in your assessment.

The price of letting it lie

A misplacement rarely costs you in the form of a visible event. It costs you in one piece of work being done slightly worse over a long time, in nobody else daring to touch it because it formally has an owner, and in the person themselves losing confidence in a matter they shouldn’t have had in the first place.

That last one is the most serious cost, because a person who’s spent two years feeling inadequate rarely becomes the person you need in the place where they actually belonged.

Where the experience lands

There’s a second cost that’s easier to miss, and it grows quietly. If the salesperson doesn’t get to negotiate, then the salesperson learns nothing that time round. Every execution leaves something behind with whoever actually did it, and if you let the wrong person do the work, the experience ends up in the wrong place.

Next time you’re therefore standing with one person who’s got a little sharper at something they’re not going to be responsible for anyway, and a salesperson standing exactly where they stood last time. Do that a few years running and the difference is large, without any single deal having gone badly enough for anyone to have reacted.

That’s why this question is about more than the outcome of the individual assignment. It decides where the know-how is built up over time, and with it what the company knows three years from now.

Something to try

Take your five most important roles and write down what each one actually consists of, meaning the pieces of work and not the title. Underline the pieces that call for a completely different kind of person than the rest of the line.

Then look at whether any of the underlined pieces belong better somewhere else, with someone who already does similar things. It’s often possible to move two or three pieces and dissolve something that has looked like a personnel matter for a year.

After that, go through your most recent larger deal and write down who in practice did what, meaning who set the price, who negotiated and who promised how the delivery would go. Compare that list with who was supposed to have done it according to their role. If the two differ, you’ve probably found both an explanation for how the deal ended and a reason why nobody got better for having done it.

In practice

In a Bollplanket conversation, this question tends to be the one lying underneath the question that was asked. The owner comes in with how to have a difficult conversation with an employee, and a while in it turns out the conversation is about a piece of work that should never have ended up there. Then it becomes a completely different and considerably easier conversation.