The Handshake Rule
What teams know that job descriptions don’t
A few weeks ago, I met Jim’s team. They are in charge of maintenance at a facility owned by a client of mine, and I was interviewing them about what it was like to be a member of this particular team. It didn’t take long to figure it out—within a few minutes of talking to them, it was very clear that Jim led by teaching. He wanted every member of his team to learn how to maintain more and more systems and pieces of equipment. And his way of teaching was to encourage his team members to figure things out for themselves—to provide broad guidance followed by plenty of leeway. The team clearly loved this about him.
Now, there are plenty of ways to be a good leader, and this was just one. Jim could have been a leader who leaned more into building strong relationships, or setting high standards, or creating a detailed vision of the future, but leader-as-teacher was clearly his thing, and it gave his team a distinct character. Every team member believed they could figure anything out, and that they were in a great place to grow as professionals.
But here’s my question for today. Suppose Jim was recruiting for a new maintenance tech on his team, and put together a job description for the role (or asked HR to create one for him). How much of the distinctive atmosphere of his team would make it into that job description—and if only a little did, would that matter?
A few different forces are shaping decision-making in large organizations today. Firstly, the uncertain economic and political environment, particularly in the US, is leading organizations to be conservative about making significant investments in the future. Secondly, AI’s promises of much greater productivity, although yet to be realized, are creating downward pressure on corporate headcounts. And thirdly—in part as a response to these first two forces, and in part because cost cutting usually plays quite well on Wall Street—companies are continuing to conduct large-scale layoffs.
All of which puts the internal movement of talent at a premium. If a company can figure out how to move employees from areas of low demand to areas of high demand instead of firing people in one place and hiring them in another, it can avoid severance costs in one place and hiring costs in another. If a company can realize efficiencies because of AI, the same logic applies—redeploying people is better for the company (and, obviously, for the employees) than letting people go. And even in a layoff, a company will typically prefer to steer employees whose jobs have been cut to other open roles within the organization. In all these cases, the ability to move current employees into open roles becomes enormously valuable.
Whether the goal is internal movement or hiring from the outside, the open roles are described, of course, by job descriptions. And job descriptions are, not to put too fine a point on it, boring, generic, and inhuman.
The problem lies in the categories of information they contain. Most job descriptions will talk about required skills, and most descriptions of skills—especially non-technical skills—get generic pretty quickly. We’re after strategic thinking and executive presence, and so is everyone else, and no one actually knows what those words mean.
Job descriptions contain objectives for a role or a team, and these tend to emerge from the editing process rendered in gleaming corporate happy talk. This role will ensure seamless integration of this thing and that thing, while maintaining the highest standards of quality. All empty calories.
There might be a list of required qualifications (“the successful candidate will have at least ten years’ experience in a senior leadership role”), but these are again broad, and bland, and most of us know they are distinctly optional as far as the hiring manager is concerned.
If the company chooses to describe itself in the job description, it will portray itself as a leader in its field (always) and as a simply delightful place to work (always) and, because it is fearful of turning prospective hires away, it will steer clear of saying anything too distinctive lest that turn people off.
There might be some stuff about location, or advancement opportunities, or how what makes this company different from all the other companies ever is The People. And the company’s lawyers will contribute some scintillating boilerplate about non-discriminatory hiring practices, just to put the cherry on top of the whole thing.
This amounts to a mishmash of vaguely work-adjacent stuff with very little to say about what a day at work will be like.
None of the things that were obvious to anyone within ninety seconds of talking to Jim and his team would show up in a job description like this. Perhaps some would come up in an interview—but there’s no guarantee of that, and besides, the point of the job description is to attract the best candidates (and also, importantly, to turn away the ones for whom the experience is less of a fit) so by the time we’re discovering things in the interview we’re already quite late in the process. The result is that job descriptions as they are usually written today are remarkably bad at helping the right people find the right teams. Which is a waste.
I was chatting with a friend the other day and he told me the three questions he uses in every job interview. They are deceptively simple: can the candidate do the work? Would the work bring them joy? And would the team enjoy working with them?
Most hiring processes focus almost exclusively on the first question. Can this person do the work? But the second and third questions matter enormously too—because people rarely thrive in jobs they do not enjoy, or on teams where they do not fit.
Together, these are questions about work, not work-ish abstractions. And they offer a way to quickly improve—and humanize—our job descriptions, because they give us better categories of information to include.
So we can ditch all the other stuff, and instead write three simple descriptions. Here are some of the things we do every day on this team—and here’s where this person might be asked to help. Here are some of the things we enjoy about what we do, and why. And here’s what we enjoy about one another.
And then there’s one more thing to change. Whether we’re moving within a company or joining one from outside, what makes the most difference to our success isn’t the company itself, or its culture, or even its newly unfurled AI-powered skills-to-jobs recommendation engine. It’s the team that we’re part of. A better job description, then, needs to be written to reflect the daily experiences of a team—and the best way to do that is to have the team itself do the writing.
I don’t know exactly what Jim’s team would write in their job description, but I can guess, from our conversation, at some of the things that might show up. They would describe fixing all manner of things, some according to the manual and some according to what they figured out was missing from the manual. They would talk about beginning each day with a meeting to plan out the shift. They might include some stories of how the unexpected happens from time to time, and how Jim’s steady hand keeps them on course. They’d mention who they are—and how they don’t really care how Bob looks or how young Andy is, as long as they’re hard-working and ready to learn. They’d surely mention Jim and his genius for leading-by-teaching, and how much they enjoy that.
And I hope, having spoken to them, that they’d include one final detail. The team has a simple rule: whenever a team member meets another team member, or anyone outside the team, they always—always—shake hands. I don’t know about you, but that tells me more about the experience of working on this team than any generic job description ever could.
In addition to writing about work, I advise businesses around the world on leadership, performance, and people. If you’d like to explore how I can help your organization, please check out my website here.