What do House Boats and Swiss Army Knives have in common? They are "monuments to compromise".  They are lousy at everything they do, but they are handy and useful when there's nothing better around.

 

Some employees are like House Boats and Swiss Army Knives. They may not be excellent at anything, but they have a certain utility.  Do you have any people like this in your organization?

House Boat 

A House Boat is a lousy house and a lousy boat.  People may own one for a variety of reasons, but sacrifice comfort, speed, and fun. A House Boat in your company is anyone who has a "hyphen" in their job title. When you combine two completely different jobs into a single position, you pretty much ensure that person will be sub-mediocre at both.

A common House Boat is the Selling Sales Manager. In theory, it makes perfect sense. Get out and make sales on your own, then supervise and guide the others so they can succeed as well. In practice, it almost never works out long term.

Why? Because exceptional success requires laser focus and specialized skills. Alternating between two roles, two goals, and two priorities is the opposite of focus. Specialized skills are learned when you specialize, not when you generalize. "The man who chases two rabbits catches neither" - Aesop

Furthermore, great managers succeed because they build and develop the people they hire and supervise. When they sell directly, they are competing with their own team. Competing for leads, opportunities, accounts, and time.

Here are some common House Boats: 

Swiss Army Knives

A Swiss Army Knife is a House Boat to the extreme. Every company has someone who does lots of things and is willing to do the company dirty work. Like the Swiss Army Knife, none of the tools are particularly good, but they sure do come in handy sometimes.

I once worked with a person who performed all these jobs during a typical week: 

None of these jobs was big enough to warrant a full time person, and none was glamorous enough to attract interest from other employees. I called this person "The Plumber", because he did all the messy but necessary tasks within the company.

The "Tweener" 

Another variation on the House Boat is the "Tweener". These people have skills and interests in two areas, but don't excel at either one.  They are just good enough to be mediocre at two things.

A common "Tweener" is the person who is too "techie" to be a good salesperson, but too "salesy" to be a good tech.  How many times have you seen that person?  One place you'll never see them?   At the top of the sales board!

Specialized Sales Roles

You are probably seeing lots of buzz around new and innovative sales roles, especially tied to inside sales and marketing.  These are being popularized by several authors, most notably Justin Roff-Marsh. 

The book tagline is "A Radical Approach to the Design of the Sales Function, and the author's not kidding.  

Roff-Marsh recommends firing all your Outside Salespeople except one, and pushing all the other sales roles to an expanded inside sales team.  

Here are some of the job titles that he recommends adding to the organization chart:

• Campaign Coordinator
• Field Specialists
• Project Leader
• Business Development Coordinator