If you have a job, you probably have a job description. This allows your manager to keep you centered on the tasks which are vital to maintaining a mission-centric focus for your forward-looking organization. It is also useful when your manager wants to evaluate you, discipline you, or assign you a completely random task which is justified by the phrase “additional duties as required.” (Kind of like TV game shows where the points are tripled in the last round making all of the rounds that come before mere window dressing.)
We need job descriptions, though, because modern jobs are so complex. In the early days of humanity, the typical job description for a hunter/gatherer would have read:
- Hunt
- Gather
Unless, of course, the human resources cave had gotten wind of the fact that the hunter/gatherer group wasn’t following tribe policy in regards to using fully-formed, ISO 9000-compliant job descriptions. Then the manager over the hunter/gatherers would have had to get out his tablet and chisel and come up with something a little more robust.
Job Title: Hunter/Gatherer
Job Focus: Provide food for tribe members using accepted hunting and gathering techniques in a manner consistent with the standards established by industry norms.
Job Qualifications:
- Significant experience as a member of a tribe-sustaining hunter/gatherer team, preferably in a harsh climate.
- Proven record of accomplishment at killing medium-to-large game animals with primitive tools.
- Advanced knowledge of hunting and gathering techniques; Masters degree preferred but not required.
Job Duties:
- Communicate effectively with individuals at all levels of the tribe including the Chief’s cave.
- Demonstrate effective teamwork skills with other members of the hunter/gatherer operating group to include working effectively in close quarters with stone-tipped spears and sharpened stone axes.
- Identify, develop and evaluate hunting strategy based on knowledge of established tribe objectives, regional characteristics, and dietary needs of tribe members.
- Coordinate and participate in the distribution of food to tribe members.
- Additional duties as assigned.
Under this description, the poor hunter/gatherer would be so busy communicating, demonstrating, identifying and coordinating that he’d never have time to actually get food for the tribe. When he sat down with his manager — the Director of Tribal Resource Gathering and Dissemination — the conversation wouldn’t go well.
“Well Thag,” the Director of Tribal Resource Gathering and Dissemination would say, “You missed your quarterly target for the total amount of food gathered for the tribe. Can you explain that?”
Thag would think, Ugh! How could he possibly be expected to find time to hunt and gather and serve on the Tribal Color Scheme Steering Committee, Chair the Standards Compliance Team and head up the intra-cave softball tournament. Besides, didn’t upper management understand that someone with his skills and talents would be severely underutilized as a mere hunter/gatherer?
Had early humans actually used modern job descriptions, mankind would probably have starved to death centuries ago. Womankind, on the other hand, would have seen that mankind was being aggressively stupid and would have solved the problem herself. Most likely, mankind probably would have included her accomplishments in the quarterly report, but at least the tribe would have gotten fed.
Another reason the ancients didn’t need job descriptions is because they didn’t have to worry about salary and benefits. Do you think that the guys who built the pyramids had health insurance and a pension plan? A typical job description for them would probably have included phrases like “must be able to shoulder heavy loads while being whipped repeatedly,” “must be skilled at chiseling stone,” and “additional duties as required.”
The salary and benefits part would have said, “all meals provided by Pharaoh, no special diets permitted,” “living space in slave quarters provided free of charge,” and “cost of drinking water will be deducted from the employee’s salary.”
Fortunately, in these more enlightened times, salary and benefits statements tend to be along the lines of “compensation commensurate with employee qualifications,” “generous travel allowance for qualified applicants,” and “all employees are expected to contribute to the office coffee fund.”
The one thing you’re not likely to find in a modern job description is a truly honest picture of what your job will be like. Let’s say that you work as an administrative assistant. Your job description will probably be full of phrases like “create and modify documents using standard office software,” “coordinate the manager’s schedule,” “assist in implementation of company policy,” and “additional duties as required.” In truth, you’ll find yourself “writing memos for the boss when he gets too busy to do it himself,” “covering for the boss when he’s late … again,” “enforcing company rules even when they don’t make sense to you,” and “pretty much holding the company together with your bare hands.”
Job descriptions that honest are tough to come by. Which is probably why we don’t have job descriptions for family members. After all, who’d ever want to be a parent if they really understood what it involved.
Job Focus: Provide food, shelter, love and guidance for one or more young humans for a period of not less than eighteen years.
Job Qualifications:
- Ability to look at random blobs of finger paint, crayon or other artistic media and discern that the purple blob is Daddy and the yellow blob is Mommy.
- Ability to make appropriately sympathetic noises for every skinned knee and bruised elbow.
- Ability to remain calm and supportive in the face of genuine injuries including bleeding head wounds and compound fractures.
- Ability to endure school plays, concerts and recitals in which your child is clearly the only one with talent.
- Ability to love your children enough to let them go when the job is finished.
As for salary and benefits … parenting is a job you pay to do, but the benefits speak for themselves.
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