Jobs, whether intentionally architected, or organically evolved, tend to be designed with the needs of the organisation and customer in mind.
On the one hand, it is much simpler to have a single role managing all the requirements and implications that emerge from a particular event, customer interaction or regulatory requirement. Working against that, job architectures are generally nested within organisational functions, which effectively priorities the demands of a hierarchical system or organisations where power and accountability flow vertically in silos.
This causes the see-saw organisational restructuring trend we have all seen, where companies tend to flip back and forth between structures aligned with work-flow, and structures aligned with hierarchy. Fun and games for everyone.
But the feature of jobs that tends to be ignored in this game is the demands that a job puts on the individual. Very often jobs end up being allocated a range of tasks, or require a body of knowledge, that do not sit easily within a single person. There is plenty of research and thinking which supports the concept of skills as a series of habits. Building up that pattern of habits will allow you to optimise yourself around certain sets of tasks or outcomes.
One of the very important characteristics of human interaction with their environment is complementarity. If you have ever tried to get a sales person to engage in compliance activities you have seen this principle in action. Certain ways of being lend themselves to some combinations of tasks and not others.
What this tends to lead to is many management 1:1 meetings where there a conversations about how a person is good at one part of their job, and bad at another part.
Now it is possible to find people who can deliver unusual combinations of capability. You will always have a couple of people in a big team who can perform exceptionally, and give you hope that you can somehow clone that person and produce a whole team of “high performers”. But these people are outliers, they are not the way that you reliable scale an organisation. Any time that you architect a job which requires an incongruent combination of motivations or behaviours you are setting people up for failure. Also, if you design a job which requires a very large body of knowledge which is hard to find in the workforce, you are going to hit problems.
The solution is to apply the principle of parsimony to your job architecture. Have your jobs focus on the narrowest possible set of outcomes, so that people can do that one thing really well.
This will likely lead to some additional organisational complexity at the interface of different roles, but will have multiple benefits.
Employees will not experience cognitive dissonance from trying to embody conflicting values or motivations at work
People will spend more time working in their comfort zone, and will be less likely to be stressed or burned-out
It will be much easier and less costly to recruit because you are not always trying to find unicorn candidates
Operations will be much more scalable
People will have more space to engage in job crafting, likely taking on additional responsibilities aligned with interest and ability
It leaves room for training and growth
These are the benefits of a skills-based approach in organisations.