By Leslie Pratch

“To fit” means to be the same size as something else, and size is something that can be measured. Organizations talk a lot about job fit. Can we measure a human being, measure a job, and then say whether they are the same size? Let’s look at what ought to have been two success stories.

1. Mike had consistently excelled as a plant manager. He met his production quotas. Accidents in his plant were rare and customer satisfaction was high. His business unit was profitable. When top management said to cut costs ten percent, Mike did – without harming quality, delivery, or safety. Senior management appreciated Mike and found the perfect way to show it. When his boss, the head of North American operations, retired, Mike was given his job. He now oversaw 15 plants in six states. Mike worked hard and had the help of his team. But running the whole division was not running a factory. Policies that had worked at the plant created havoc when applied them to the division. He also experienced his team as unhelpful: Managers fired information at him, introducing problems, and contradicting each other. Mike became increasingly confused. Why was Mike unable to do the job?
2. When a family-owned company was acquired by institutional investors, the new owners decided to eliminate unnecessary layers of middle management. Promising lower-level managers were retained subsequently were assigned challenging projects, challenges they would have had to wait years for otherwise. Not all of them could rise to the challenge. Some fumbled. Their superiors tried to help, but ended up having to walk their subordinates through much of the work. Why couldn’t some of these promising young managers take the balls that were thrown to them? Why did their superiors’ help not help?

To explain what went wrong in these cases, I’m going to introduce a set of ideas developed by social scientist Elliott Jaques and expounded by Joseph Sabbath and John Elder. When I assess an executive, I utilize Jaques’ theory to determine whether that individual has the cognitive capacity to perform the work of the role. Jaques spent 40 years investigating the nature of work and human capability.

The result is his Stratified Systems Theory. He discovered that the level of responsibility in any organizational role – whether a manager’s or an individual contributor’s – can be objectively measured in terms of the target completion time of the longest task, project, or program assigned to that role. The more distant the target completion date of the longest task or program, the heavier the weight of responsibility is felt to be.

Jaques found that tasks fall into discrete categories, each characterized by the maximum amount of time the person is expected to carry on without direct supervision (the task’s time span) and the degree to which the task requires the person to process a variety of information and come to conclusions about it (the task’s complexity).

Measuring the Job: Time Span

Organizational roles then fall into discrete levels, each defined by the longest time span and the highest task complexity required to carry out that role. Jaques calls these levels “strata.” The time-span measure of a role corresponds to the length of the longest task or assignment, from point of inception to targeted completion date. This measure provides information pertaining to the level-of-work complexity for the role.

For example, a supervisor whose principal job is to plan tomorrow’s production assignments and next week’s work schedule but who also has ongoing responsibility for uninterrupted production supplies for the month ahead has a responsibility time span of one month. A foreman who spends most of his time pushing forward on this week’s production quotas but who must also develop a program to deal with the labor requirements of next year’s retooling has a time span of a year or a little more. The advertising vice president who stays late every night working on next week’s layouts but who also has to begin making contingency plans for the expected launch of two new local advertising media campaigns three years hence has a time span of three years.

Jacques also found that the boundaries between successive managerial layers occur at certain specific time-span increments, just as ice changes to water and water to steam at certain specific temperatures. In more than 100 studies in different organizations in different countries over 35 years Jacques consistently found such discontinuities. That everyone saw the boundaries in the same places suggests that they reflect some truths about human capability for work. Real managerial and hierarchical boundaries occur at time spans of three months, one year, two years, five years, ten years, and twenty years.

These natural discontinuities in our perception of the time span create hierarchical strata that workers in different companies, countries, and circumstances all seem to regard as genuine and acceptable. The existence of such boundaries has important implications in nearly every sphere of management. One of these is performance appraisal. Another is the capacity of managers to add value to the work of their subordinates.

According to Jaques, effective value-adding managerial leadership of subordinates can only come from an individual one category higher in cognitive capacity, working one category higher in problem complexity. By contrast, wherever managers and subordinates are in the same layer – separated only by differential compensation – subordinates see the boss as too close, breathing down their necks, and they identify their “real” boss as the next manager at a genuinely higher level of cognitive and task complexity.

Jaques discovered seven work strata, ranging from assembly line to corporate CEO. The time spans and task complexities for these strata progress at predictable intervals.

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Leslie Pratch, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist from the Northwestern Medical School with an M.B.A. in Strategy and Finance from Chicago Booth and a B.A. in Religion from Williams College. She works with boards of directors of public companies as well as private equity investors to assess and develop executives. She can be reached at (312) 464-7919 or leslie@pratchco.com or www.pratchco.com.