When a company promotes someone, they often get a team to run while still maintaining the job they already had. Coaching, performance conversations, and decisions about other people’s work land on top of a week that was already full. Survey data shows as many as 97% of managers are in that position, carrying individual contributor work alongside leadership duties. When the work starts slipping, some companies view it as a management failure. Rewriting the job before the title changes is what prevents this from happening, and the task typically falls on HR.
Dafra Sanou is Founder and Principal HR Consultant at Sanou HR Advisory. He’s spent more than 15 years building HR functions in construction, manufacturing, healthcare, and corporate settings. Sanou most recently ran HR at Global Roofing Group, a national commercial contractor, while it grew from 300 to more than 600 people. There, he also built the role-based career pathways people were promoted into.
“We often treat promotions as recognition for past performance, when it really should be a redesign of a job,” says Sanou. “Most of the time a company identifies someone who has done well. From a technical standpoint, they’re awesome, they understand operations, and they’re ready for promotion. They don’t take into consideration the workload that person currently has and what that person will have going into the new role.” Sanou has watched this happen to foremen stepping up to superintendent and to managers moving into VP roles. From his perspective, the company usually sees the strain, but misses what caused it.
Signs of strain before burnout
A manager carrying both their old and new jobs often stops planning ahead, working only on what the day demands. Sanou says the signs of strain show up in the work long before the word “burnout” does. “Nobody wants to say they’re burned out,” he says. “There are always signs. You don’t answer the phone. You get 20 emails you can’t get back to.”
Sanou says the workload behind a missed goal rarely gets examined. The person carrying it seldom raises it themselves, and he suggests fear is part of the reason. “When you’re not able to meet a certain goal, or you don’t manage your team well, it’s a ding on your performance,” he notes. “‘We thought you were going to do good, but you’re not keeping up with the work, you’re not able to do the job.’ And those are signs of burnout.”
The person under the most pressure is usually the one a company rated highest. When their new role fails, Sanou performs a diagnosis and looks at how it was designed. “Somebody is upset or burned out, and it’s ‘You know what, I’m done with this place, I’m going somewhere else,'” he adds. “Or maybe it’s the other way around. ‘Well, you’re not performing.’ And then we actually created a reason why we’re going to let you go.”
Redesigning the role up front
A company usually knows whom it plans to promote before that employee is aware of the decision, and Sanou wants their new job rewritten in that timeframe. Drawing from experience working with commercial contractors, he notes promotions moved people up through the crews. Once the employee is aware of it, he finds they resist handing work off, since a new title is supposed to mean more responsibility. “Look at the current job of what the person is doing, review the entire job from A to Z, and also look at what they’re going to do today and maybe what can be delegated,” he says.
Sanou opens a new role when the level below is already carrying a full load. In many cases, the work moves down a level. “Some of those responsibilities you used to do need to go back to the foreman who’s taking over, so now he can learn as well,” he notes.
Clarity over chaos
Sanou takes stock of which decisions a new manager can make alone, putting one-on-ones and goal reviews on a fixed schedule. In his experience, a manager who starts without those decisions spelled out ends up making calls that belonged to their boss. The job description is where Sanou spells them out, and BambooHR’s Redesigning Work report found 77% of HR professionals plan to update employees’ job descriptions in the next 12 months. “A good manager needs to know their boundaries, what realm they should operate in, and what decisions they can and can’t make,” he adds.
A company Sanou once worked with had grown through a run of acquisitions, and performance was slipping across the business. Titles had moved with each deal, but the jobs behind them stayed as they were. Sanou reviewed every description in the company, reassigned the duties so that each one sat with a single role, and hired a manager to take the work a vice president had been doing. He notes that rewriting the roles truly changed the company for the better. “When it’s defined, there’s a structure, there’s a definition of what everybody is doing, who’s responsible for what, and what lane you should stay in,” he concludes. “I think clarity appears, and now you really can perform the way you should be performing. There’s less chaos.”
