Online Reporter
Employee Relations
Dr Request Machimbira
THE job description, long treated as the Bible of the workplace, is quietly collapsing. Static roles and performance scorecards tied to employees are now “measuring ghosts”, assessing employees against duties that mutated months ago. For decades, the job description was a contract of stability. Today it is often a historical document.
We are running quarterly reviews of roles that changed last month and keep evolving. This shift is not academic. It is operational. As humanity evolves, so does work.
Agriculture gave us managers. Industrialisation gave us standard operating procedures. The artificial intelligence (AI) and post-pandemic era has given us something new: roles that refuse to sit still.
HR’s new mandate
The rapid mutation of work has forced a reckoning in the human resources (HR) function. The department, once seen as the custodian of compliance, is being pushed to become an “architect of adaptation”. HR’s job is no longer to police job descriptions. It is to facilitate role adaptation.
The new key performance indicators (KPIs) are adaptation velocity and time to new value. The imperative for learning and adapting organisations is here.
Nowhere is this clearer than in sales. The old doctrine demanded 70 percent of a salesperson’s time be spent in the field.
Today, high-value clients may refuse physical meetings yet still demand urgent solutions. A WhatsApp video call or Teams meeting at 11pm now closes deals that handshakes once did. If sales — one of the most ritualised functions — has shapeshifted this hard, no department is immune.
What adaptation really means
Adaptation is not just flexibility or upskilling. It is the deliberate, continuous reshaping of one’s role, tasks, tools, relationships and priorities without waiting for formal permission. Flexibility bends. Upskilling adds tools. Adaptation redesigns the workbench. “It’s an employee looking at a new problem and saying, ‘My job title doesn’t solve this, but I will.’”
Building that capacity requires dismantling the top-down work design. Companies are being urged to replace prescription with conversation through “role labs” that ask three questions: What part of our work died this quarter? What new problem is the customer paying us to solve? What method must we invent?
From managers to coaches
The shift also demands a new kind of leadership. The industrial-era manager was a controller of tasks. The adaptation-era manager must act as a performance coach.A controller asks: “Did you do it?” A coach asks: “What changed? What are you learning? How do we redesign your role around that?”
Even job titles are under scrutiny. Expect to see a production superintendent become a production performance enabler, and a sales manager rebranded as customer growth architect.
Titles should signal outcomes, not territory. Language leads behaviour.
The role charter solution
The proposed replacement of the job description is the “role charter”— a one-page, living agreement reviewed quarterly and co-created by employee and manager.
A role charter outlines:
Purpose — Why the role exists
Outcomes owned — Measurable value, not tasks
Decisions authorised — What can be changed without permission
Evolution clause — How the role is expected to mutate
Learning priority — The skill that unlocks the next version of the employee
The advantage of the role charter is speed, ownership and clarity without rigidity. It turns one-on-ones from status updates into role design sessions.
The imperative
The message to boards and CEOs is blunt: Focus less on chasing targets and more on role adaptation. Make ‘time to first contribution on a new problem’ a metric.
Reward the percentage of a role self-authored each quarter. Learning must be the real deliverable. Revenue is a lagging indicator of adaptation.
Read more on: www.heraldonline.co.zw
Dr Request Machimbira is the executive director of Proficiency Consulting Group and the International Wellness Institute. For feedback, email request @proficiencyinternational.com or phone +263772693404.
The job description promised stability. The role charter promises relevance.
Organisations that entrench adaptation will author the next decade. Those that cling to prescription will produce perfect employees for a world that no longer exists.
The choice is binary: Adapt the role, or watch the role and the person in it become defunct. For starters, study your job description this week and email me your feedback.
