What today's job represents

Let’s Talk – Tracy Bosch

My name is Tracy Bosch. I'm a senior client partner with Korn Ferry and I have been with the firm for 22 years.

Jobs are critical.

The job is absolutely not dead. Jobs are critical. So, what jobs do is they give people purpose, they give people clarity, and they give people ownership.

So, jobs are actually the essence of what transformation is all about, because jobs represent what I am held accountable for, what people count on me for, and part of transformation is all about making that clear and making that real for people and people see that through the lens of their job. They feel like, when there's all of this change and transformation and uncertainty around me, what is my anchor? What do I hold true?

Tell me what my job is, and I will deliver that for you.

Well, tell me what my job is — make that clear to me, and that's the thing that I will do and I will deliver for you. So, I think jobs are absolutely not dead. Jobs are the key thing to be able to articulate. You know, to be able to articulate what you need people to contribute to the team, and I'm not saying that jobs have to be organized in fixed boxes, right?

In fact, you know, the more we automate a lot of the transactional stuff around jobs, jobs are going to become increasingly less standardized, they're going to become less and less black and white.

We all still need to know what it is that we’re responsible for.

But at the end of the day, we all still need to know what it is that we're responsible for and it doesn't matter whether we're the CEO or the scrum master or the head of engineering or, you know, the HR generalist, it doesn't matter what our role is, we all need to have some clarity about what is expected of us and how we contribute to the team, and that's defined in the job.