Companies need to do better at defining job roles (MUCH better)

Human brains like stories, so I’ll start this job role odyssey with a story.

In June of 2014, I had just finished graduate school. In hindsight, that whole deal was probably a mistake — I’m thousands of dollars in debt and I don’t even work in a field related to what I studied. Oh well. You live and learn. So at the time I’m living in Minneapolis, and my wife and I are job searching. I fly down to Texas to have a final interview with this one B2B gig. I get down here, go out to lunch with my eventual boss and her boss, and we all do the dance and the spiel. This role is so essential. It’s going to be everything. So, so, so great. So big. The best. (Trump hadn’t come on the Presidential scene yet, but it felt like that.) Ultimately, I take this job and start in July.

Within about six days of having this gig, I realized it had absolutely no job role. The technical definition is “peripheral,” meaning what I did wasn’t core to the revenue-generation of the place. This is a common issue for a lot of people. I’ve seen studies that of every 5 employees, only 2 face revenue. If that’s all the top dogs care about, that means 60 percent of the company (3 in 5) is essentially irrelevant to those with influence. Is that really a way to spend the middle part of your life?