Time has come to redefine seniority
Ranking humans in a workplace typically brings a dose of confusion into any debate. Organizations seem to enjoy the process of crafting elaborate schemes of ranks, only to see themselves struggle more than benefit from them.
Not only people in operations, human resources and customers see seniority differently; the concept is utterly incomparable between companies.
That’s a signal seniority, as currently used, is a weak ground for a rational debate and decision-making.
The remedy is rather simple; admit there is no one-dimensional metric to rank individuals in all their traits and under all circumstances.
Someone performs on a senior level in one setting and is a subpar choice in another. And that’s okay.
Yet, there is one very good intuition to replace the ill-defined concept of seniority when the topic of ranking individuals arises. Simply ask a question:
[under the conditions and task to be done]… how much damage is the individual able to cause, unintentionally?
Circumstances is crucial to the question — here we ditch the idea of a single-dimensional metric to measure everything under all conditions. We simply focus on the task we’re up to.
Damage is simply the inverse of what we are trying to achieve through collective work.
As a result, thinking this way un-derails any pointless abstract conversation and gives a firm ground for all parties to discuss what’s actually important — the task at hand and the suitability of one’s talents at it.
Voilà, we’re saved!
