During the desert that was 2000-2001 for Internet start-ups, I lost my job four times. My career to that point had been 90% mundane but the last 10% was wildly exciting. I got to work with a successful startup out of Silicon Valley, CitySearch.com, and it changed my life. But after 3 blazingly fun years I was faced with a decision to relocate or leave the company. Being a single mom with two teenagers at home, relocating really was not an option, so I took high risk jobs just to stay in the internet industry and stay in Nashville. All of them busted within months. After the fourth one I decided to consult for a while before accepting another position that would likely disappear in a handful of weeks. That decision lead to me starting Paramore Digital which went on for 15 years successfully, and changed my life in more dramatic ways, but it was an inauspicious beginning.

I was VP of Sales for the last of those four companies. Just before it went out of business we were pitching NFIB, The National Federation of Independent Business, for a small marketing project for their HR department. Since the company was folding, NFIB contracted directly with me to handle the project. I love the business development process. Selling is my thing.

The project we were discussing was to digitize their recruiting process. At the time they hired thousands of independent sales reps each year and were still using a VHS tape and stacks of paper as part of the recruiting process. This was way before streaming video was possible, so I pitched a small website focused on recruiting and a CD to replace the VHS tape and paper forms which would save money in the mailing process. Easy enough. Sold!

It was fun driving to my home office with a signed contract. I sprinted back to my desk to start work immediately and read the contract I’d written the day before, intending to make a To Do list. As I got to the first recommendation I felt the beginnings of a hot flash “What did I mean by that?” I thought. I continued on, the hot flash taking hold, “Well, how am I going to do that?”

I put the signed proposal down and backed away slowly.

But I persisted the next day, finding resources to produce the CD, literally drawing a crude wireframe to explain my vision, then got back to the part I loved...setting up more meetings with the client where I could present and gain consensus. Just a few short weeks later I had a small HR website online and 2500 beautiful, brand consistent CDs in my office. I caressed the CD thinking how fun it was to figure out how to manage an idea I’d come up with and hold a physical thing in my hands as proof of its success. I turned the CD over, taking in the details; the images, logo, address, 800 phone number.

That hot flash again as I thought, I wonder who answers this 800 number?

I picked up my office phone and dialed it... ....and was greeted by a sex talk line.

The conversation with the client later that day was, ummm, interesting. And of course there was a reorder, and a credit and my first loss on a project. One for one. Great start.

But it’s cool. Things happen, and cash flows and I moved on. There was no shortage of sales opportunities. I loved being with the client, but back in the home office I was patching it together. It took longer than it should to write proposals. I barely had any office equipment. I didn’t have a logo or letterhead. But networking, getting people excited and gaining their trust? I was golden there.

The business progressed. I hired a part time person who knew all the things I didn’t. She would go on to be our first full time staff. I added two more, and then got an office. We had the legal documents we needed to be a real business and the revenue to match. Three years later our revenue passed $1 million.

Our hiring philosophy was pretty simple. If we needed you and we found you, we hired you. If we found you and we liked you but we didn’t know if we needed you, we hired you. For the most part I agreed each time a trusted team member said we needed to add another person to the team. We didn’t have a good way of really knowing how much work we had coming in and how much bandwidth our staff had, so when people started to complain we’d just hire the next breathing person we found that we liked.

“An informal structure developed, which isn’t a good idea.”

Once hired, they’d show up for work, we’d find them a place to sit, sometimes at the office kitchen counter, and then we’d start putting them in meetings. At the end of the meeting we’d talk about what needed to be done next and decide who would do it. That’s how we found out what people could, and couldn’t do well. Over the first seven years as we grew, people fell naturally into one job or another. We would sort of promote someone to oversee a person or a group, stopping short of using the words “department” or “manager.” People wanted to start adding “Senior” to their title, but I didn’t have much time or patience for career growth conversations with the staff, so they just figured it out themselves, and an informal structure developed, which isn’t a good idea.

At the time I didn’t know about Bruce Tuckman’s work on the four stages of team development but in retrospect as we were moving from the forming stage of business into the storming stage, the lack of formal structure made the office ripe for turf wars. We had about 15 people on staff so there were pockets where one or two people could hide out, pretending to work, and opportunities for cowboys to run roughshod over a team whether they were right or not. Our clients and projects were bigger and more complex so when part of the team slowed down, or ignored the work of other team members, problems developed. We wasted time. We missed deadlines. Tempers flared.

I absolutely hated this stage of the business. The team was talented, but they were also young and lacked the perspective of an owner or a client; the perspective that says it’s not about you, it’s about the work.

Enter HR, not because I wanted it, but because my director of operations told me she wouldn’t process any more terminations on her own. We hired an HR consultant who drug me, grudgingly, down the road of formalizing structure, roles and responsibilities. Words like “compliance” became a part of our conversations. To be “in compliance” (with who/what?!?) we were supposed to have files for each employee and a standard way we hired, paid and promoted people. Phew. The underpinning of the HR compliance process is, in my opinion, the most useless of all business documents, the job description.

Pump the brakes.

I hadn’t had a job description in a very long time. And I had not missed it. And, quite frankly, I did not want to do this work. I wanted people to show up and work from inspiration, not from a job description.

But we continued to push toward compliance, and after creating an imperfect org chart, our HR consultant set out to find or write job descriptions for the positions we’d settled on.

“The Role of the CEO:

Grow and mentor the leadership team.
Set Vision and Direction.
Be the Face of the Company.
Manage the financials.
Be available for key relationships.”

What we got back was not good. Most of the job descriptions were way off, but even the few that seemed to be close were terribly, terribly written, as if there was another language used exclusively by job description writers, unintelligible to any real human being. It was as if only one job description had ever been written from scratch, and all the others were iterations off of that one, in no way describing what the company did or what the employee needed to do to be successful.

Since the beginning of the company, our tagline had been “Simple. Clear. Focused on Results.” I wanted everything our company did to align with this directive. An unintelligible job description certainly was not the way to start a relationship with a new team member.

I was frustrated, but with the threat of noncompliance looming I had to see this process through. It was becoming clear to me that some of the discord we were having was because we hadn’t drawn boundaries. We hadn’t been clear about what we expected people to do. In the absence of leadership, as the scripture says, the people perish. You don’t really want that in a young company.

I complained about this to Liz, my business coach, one day, and she turned it back to me by saying, “What do you think your job is?”

I grabbed a note card and wrote five items:

Grow and mentor the leadership team
Be the face of the company
Set vision and direction
Manage the financials
Be available for key relationships

““Everything flows from the top.””

We discussed each and she helped me to amplify them, probing for where I went too deep into managing instead of directing and we left the meeting in agreement that this was my job. I sat on it for a short while and then, finally, I had an aha moment... everything flows from the top.

“We violated our own mantra. We had not been simple, clear or focused on results with our HR strategy.”

I wanted the team to understand the goals of the company and their part in reaching them just like I did. I wanted them to know how to solve conflicts without involving me. I wanted the leaders (by this time we had them) to develop their teams. I wanted them to understand profitability. But how were they supposed to do that when we had violated our own mantra? We had not been simple, clear or focused on results with our HR strategy.

It had to begin with me. I had to lead the senior leadership team and model for them what I wanted from them, and that had to start with clarity in what my job was.

So I wrote the job descriptions myself. Starting with my job and then moving to the leadership team, I created a job description format that people would be able to read and understand. They would know what their role was inside their department, the purpose of the department and its straight line of responsibility to the financial success of the firm. The leadership team worked with me to write job descriptions for every role in the very same format. It took a long time, and it was tiresome and it was good. It changed our company.

The Job Description Format

Creating a job description format that we used throughout our company worked wonders. It clarified everything from the title to expectations on billable hours. I’m going to break it down by section for you below.

Section 1: Title, Direct Reports and Position Overview

This first section gives a quick synopsis of what the document is (the job description for the President & CEO position) and when it was written (2013). It then tells you who reports to this position and gives a quick position overview, an encapsulation of the main responsibilities of the job.

Section 2: The Departments

Since the first section names the positions that are direct reports to the President & CEO, the next section needs to spell out the departments and their responsibilities. The department descriptions are purposely top-line so that they are clear and memorable.

Section 3: Core Responsibilities of this position

This is the meat of this job description. It lists the five areas of responsibility for this position at a high level. In general, job descriptions need to remain high level so that you don’t get caught up in debates with employees about specifics. No boss likes to hear someone say “That’s not in my job description.” Instead, the job description needs to focus on the areas of responsibility and leave specific tasks and goals to annual planning with your team.

In addition to the five areas of responsibility, there is a statement that the employee is expected to make decisions with the core tenets of the business; the core values, five filters and four areas of focus. More on that later.

Section 4: Personal Habits and Traits

Describing the behavior you expect in the office is important, especially when your workforce is so young. You are teaching them how to behave. We wrote this section clearly in our voice in a way that it would be memorable to the staff.

Section 5: The 5 Filters

One of my goals in writing these job descriptions was to give a clear and understandable view of what Paramore Digital was and how we worked. We had developed The 5 Filters which described our attitude and brand. They helped to build confidence and consistency in how we showed up in the community, with our clients and with each other.

Section 6: The 4 Areas of Focus

We had adopted the 4 Areas of Focus at one of our company retreats and they became a great decision making tool for us. If we were considering how to market the company or what new products or services to offer our clients, we used the 4 Areas of Focus to guide those decisions. Including this in the job descriptions helped solidify them throughout the company. They were embraced and used almost daily to make decisions.

Section 7: The Core Values

And finally, the Granddaddy of them all, The Core Values. We used these everywhere, in everything we did. They were painted on our walls, included in every proposal and presentation, written about in magazines and included in the job descriptions. They were embraced and used daily by our staff to make decisions about almost everything.

Rolling It Out

“Describe the position inside a department inside a company...”

Once I got started on this job description it flowed out of me as if it had been sitting there for a long time just waiting for me to open the tap. It was clear and commonsense. After the HR consultant saw it she added core competencies and educational requirements but that mattered less to me than describing the position inside a department inside a company in a way that the potential employee could understand. In addition, I wanted people to have a real sense of how we expected people to act and the core focus and beliefs of the company

As I moved on to the VP job descriptions the magic of this simple format quickly became apparent. Each section expanded with more detail as it was used throughout the company, mirroring how roles move from strategic to managerial to operational from the highest rank to the most entry level position. When we finished, we had consistency in our understanding of the company’s structure and the goals for each department and position.

The iterations were like this:

Reports to and Direct Reports: Specified the reporting structure which is more rare than you think. Many people don’t know who they report to directly. It also specified which team (department) the position was a part of. For instance, in the Account Manager job description it says “Reports to the Director of Account Service and is a part of the Account Service Team.” That may seem redundant but it’s not. There are a lot of matrixed organizations and dotted line reporting relationships which are confusing.

Position Overview: A short description of the role. Also in the director or VP job descriptions there is a specific statement that this is either a strategic position, a managerial or a hands-on position or a combination.

The Departments: In all job descriptions except the CEO, this section is a description of the responsibilities and goals of the department the job is seated in. For our managers who had multiple roles reporting to them, we also included a short description of those roles as well as the description of the department.

Responsibilities: This is where the magic happens. Every position in the company, even though they are more managerial and tactical than the CEO, has responsibilities that support the CEO’s five areas of responsibility. The iterations went like this:

1. Set company vision and direction

The VP’s job description includes “Supports the vision and direction of the company.” It goes on to describe how the position does that including helping to shape the vision and direction and carrying it through the department so that the work supports the vision and direction of the company.

2. Grow and mentor the Senior Leadership Team

For VPs this responsibility was further fleshed out. Using the VP of Production as an example, that job description said “Develop a production team that delivers excellent, profitable strategies to our clients.”

We also had a layer of Directors who reported to VPs. Their job descriptions also included this responsibility specific to their department.

3. Manage the financials of the company

For the CEO, this is focused on financial stability and having the right structure to ensure ongoing operations. For VPs and Directors and their teams this responsibility meant focusing on profitability for each project and client.

4. Be available for key relationships

As the CEO, you can’t actively oversee many relationships. Your focus has to be on the Senior Leadership Team. But being available for key relationships is different. A key relationship could be your largest client during major campaigns or renewal of the contract. It could also be your smallest if that company is in trouble and needs some of your attention. Your accountant and banker are key relationships at specific points in the year. So is the media or potential partners or a non-profit for which you volunteer.

This trickles down to the VPs and Directors, who actively oversee many more relationships than a CEO does, by being a model for juggling and switching gears and prioritizing how your time is spent.

5. Be the face of the company

This is usually seen as the job of the CEO, but it applies to the team when they show up in the community or in front of clients or prospects. Anybody who does business under your brand is being the face of the company at that moment. Modeling how to do that effectively and leave the impression you want is the role of the CEO. We set the standard.

After implementing a commonsense structure backed by commonsense job descriptions we experienced alignment like we never had before. People knew what their jobs were. It was easier to hire people. It was easier to know what we were missing in our team. It was easier to reward people and to build teams. Even though I went into the process kicking and screaming, on the other side of the process was peace.

Structure works.