Kristen put away the psychological profile. "Okay, you're not going to look at this. You want a job description. But I can't just write a job description, you really want a system?"

"Yes, a system," I replied. "Take these elements, put each element into a circle, then put arrows between each circle. You may add and take away elements. This picture will represent your system.

• The work
• Roles doing the work
• Roles making sure the work gets done
• Job description for each role, broken into Key Result Areas, including tasks, goals and time span
• Ten questions specific to each Key Result Area (6 Key Result Areas = 60 written questions)
• Job posting
• Resume review
• Screening phone calls
• Telephone interviews
• Face to Face interviews
• Skills Testing
• Selection Matrix
• Reference checks
• Background checks
• Offer (contingent)
• Drug Testing
• Offer (confirmation)
• Orientation
• Training
• Productive work
• Assessment
• Training (more)
• Career pathing

"Tweak your system, work your system." -TF

"You are right," Kristen relented. "I really am too busy. My priorities are focused on short term fires. I feel like all I do, all day long, gets consumed with management issues and keeping people motivated. I don't have time to work on basic stuff like writing job descriptions. When I look at doing that, it is so far down my urgency scale, I almost think writing a job description is silly."

"What would be the payoff?" I asked.

"The payoff? I can't even think about the payoff. I could write a job description and then I would have a job description, but I would be further behind dealing with all the crap," she explained.

"Kristen, you are not unlike most managers," I nodded. "If you could truly focus on getting the right people, most of the crap you deal with would largely go away.

"Stop working on crap and start working on systems. Your life will only improve when you start working on systems." -TF

From the Ask Tom mailbag:

Question:
You have talked about Managers and systems. And you've described the most important system for a Manager as the People System. What's inside that system?

Response:
There are three primary accountabilities for any Manager.

• First, is that the Manager is responsible for the output of the team. I don't listen to excuses that some team member failed to perform, or some other team member fell short. I hold the Manager accountable for the output of the team.
• The ingredients that support that output are the ability of the Manager to assemble the team together. This has a great deal to do with identifying and selecting talent.
• Once assembled, the Manager must lead the team to work together, competently and with commitment in pursuit of the goal.

Failure in any part of this system falls to the Manager. -TF

"This has nothing to do with bonuses," Dean protested.

"As I look at these goals, each attached to a bonus, every team has an internal goal, based on some efficiency. The highest efficiency for each team can best be achieved by ignoring the goals of the other teams.

"Here is the central question," I continued. "Do you think the company can be most effective by making each of its internal departments most efficient?"

"Well, yeah," Dean replied.

"It seems counterintuitive, but for the company to be most effective, some of the departments may have to be less efficient."

Dean looked puzzled.

"Look, Dean, of your four departments, which is the slowest, the department that everyone has to wait for?"

Dean looked at a chart with his four teams. Red, blue, green and orange. "It's the green team. They're the bottleneck. We would put more resources in there, but they are too expensive. We just do the best we can."

"And when everyone is focused on their own stuff and not paying attention to the green team, what happens?"

"Well, the blue team feeds them work. But the blue team works most efficiently in batches, so they feed zero work for two days, then dump a bunch of work on the green team at the same time. The green team can only work so fast, so everything stacks up there and everything goes late."

"So, why doesn't the blue team work in smaller batches and feed work sooner?" I asked.

"Well, if the blue team works in smaller batches, they can't produce enough to make their goal. And their goal is tied to their bonus."

"So, you have a bonus problem." -TF

"What would be the benefit of drawing a flow chart of this system?" I asked. Valerie had solved the problem, but I wanted her to transform the solution into a system that could be used again.

"For starters, drawing a picture of the system helps me get it straight in my own mind, and makes it easier to explain it to someone else," she replied.

"And what if one of your team members has a suggestion for improvement?"

"They can go right to the spot on the picture and we can talk about it." Valerie was already pulling a piece of paper to the table.

"Valerie, what's different about your supervisor solving this problem yesterday and the work you are about to do now, as a manager?"

"Well, my supervisor solved the problem to get us out of a jam, yesterday. I am working on a system to prevent the jam from happening again. My supervisor was working for one day. I am working on the future."