Elliott Jaques - Levels of Work
Elliott Jaques's Levels of Work sorts roles and people by the time-span of discretion they can handle, from immediate tasks to multi-year strategic shaping, so you can see whether someone is over-stretched, under-used, or in the right seat.
A vertical ladder runs upward, each rung holding a wider span of discretion than the one below.
Reach for this when…
- A promotion isn't working and nobody can say why.
- You're structuring a new layer of management and unsure how many levels you actually need.
- Someone brilliant in their old job is drowning in the new one.
How to run it
- Map the complexity strata by time horizon, from immediate tasks to multi-year strategic shaping.
- Assess the level of complexity the role actually requires.
- Assess the level the person currently operates at.
- Compare the two: below level reads as frustration, above reads as overwhelm.
- Use the gap to redesign the role, or plan development, or both.
A worked example
Situation. Petra Novakova, HR director at Morava Cargo, a logistics firm in Brno, Czechia, promoted her best regional dispatcher into a network planning role and watched him stall.
Applied. Mapping both roles against Jaques's strata, she saw the dispatcher job sat at Stratum I, solve today's problem today, while network planning needed Stratum III thinking eighteen months out. He wasn't failing, he was in the wrong stratum.
Result. She moved him back into a senior dispatch role he then excelled in, and hired the planning role separately. Two people right-sized instead of one person quietly broken.
The catch
The strata are a real distinction, but assessing which one a role or person sits at leans on judgement calls that are easy to fudge toward the answer you already wanted. The model says nothing about skill, motivation or fit, only capacity for complexity, so it needs pairing with something that does. And a seven-tier model applied to a twelve-person company can feel like over-engineering.
Don't use it to explain away a bad hire. Ask first whether the role was ever pitched at the right level.
Origin: Elliott Jaques