Archives for January 29, 2025

Many organizations are experimenting with “job deconstruction,” a new way of organizing work where employees’ skills are dynamically matched with specific tasks or projects rather than through fixed roles. While this is a potentially transformative organizing principle for enhancing talent deployment across organizations, its implementation is not without challenges. Research highlights three tensions in particular which, if left unchecked, risk alienating employees and failing to deliver the benefits of job deconstruction: Balancing autonomy and control, balancing detachment and belonging, and balancing growth and stability. Implementing guardrails that place the human experience front and center can buffer against the negative effects of these tensions.

In selecting the most creative people or ideas to hire or implement, many organizations use multi-step processes that winnow the initial pool to a group of finalists and then select “the best of the best” from the finalists. Research conducted in which the authors were involved found that such an approach may be a waste of time and resources and that the experts trying to pick the winners from the finalists agonize and can’t really determine the clearly superior choices. A better approach might be: keep the selection criteria for identifying talent or potential relatively broad, don’t try to select the best of the best and instead use other criteria such as diversity or cultural fit, involve experts early in the process, and create a community of winners that includes all finalists.