Success Defined: More Than a Job Description

During a conversation from this morning, I was talking to a business owner preparing to add a new member to their team. As we walked through the decision-making process around making this move and whether it was a good idea, someone shared the following…

“My advice? Get really clear on what success looks like for this role. The clearer you are in the beginning, the easier it will be to tell if it’s a successful hire down the road.”

It can be easy to make a hire, give them a job description that ChatGPT generated, and then hope for the best. The challenge? Giving someone a job description is different than defining what it will take to succeed.

The job description defines an employee’s specific duties, responsibilities, and expectations associated with their role. What are the day-to-day activities that come with the job? As we’re hiring, job descriptions provide a quick snapshot of what experiences and skills make a good candidate.

Getting clear on what success looks like takes this a few steps further…

It’s about getting clear on how their specific role contributes to the organization’s mission, vision, core values, and long-term goals. What does impact look like as an individual contributor within a larger brand? With that in mind, what short-term needle-moving goals can we set and pursue? What is measurable, whether it’s a number that can be tracked or something more qualitative, like customer satisfaction? Looking ahead, what kind of development plan can the organization put in place to help this new person thrive in their role, gain experiences, and prepare for future growth?

That last part is key. Defining success cannot be 100% tied to the new employee’s efforts. Success is collaborative in nature, and it’s on the business to set their team members up for success. If that gets missed, no definition of success will ever be achieved, resulting in mutual frustration.

It’s also on the business to set up intentional feedback loops. Making room to celebrate success when it is achieved and eliminate roadblocks to success when they show up is a non-negotiable. Unfortunately, at the pace of business today, we can easily dismiss this as a nice-to-have, unnecessary – which is a massive miss.

Some days, the blogs we write remind us to walk the talk. Clarifying success for our own team is something we need to continue working on, talking about, and defining for each individual – it is work that will never be “done.”

Call-to-Action

When you make your next hire, define what success looks like. Get on the same page, document it, track it, and celebrate it when it happens. ROI can be hard to see sometimes, but a clear definition of what success looks like can make it visible.