A mid-sized company I recently worked with had 23 pay grades, three job evaluation methodologies running in parallel, and a compensation team of five people whose main job was to maintain the system. When I asked the CEO how many real layers of decision-making the organisation had, he thought for a moment and said: "Four. Maybe five."
Twenty-three grades for five layers of real work. That's not a compensation structure, that's compliance theatre.
This is not an isolated case. Across the world, and increasingly in Gulf companies, I see the same pattern: organisations adopt sophisticated grading frameworks from major consultancies, and within a few years, the framework becomes the problem it was supposed to fix. I have seen Organisation Design & Development specialists in large (ranging from 1,000 to 30,000 employees) companies. Those are people whose job title suggests they should be shaping how the organisation works, who spend the bulk of their time rewriting job descriptions so that roles can be re-evaluated and slotted into the correct grade. Not designing organisations. Servicing the grading machine.

The Promise and the Trap
The dominant job evaluation systems, Korn Ferry's Hay Guide Chart-Profile Method, Mercer's International Position Evaluation (IPE), WTW's Global Grading System, AON's proprietary frameworks, all share a reasonable starting premise. They break jobs down into measurable factors (know-how, problem-solving, accountability, or their equivalents), assign numerical scores, and produce a total "job size" that slots into a grade. The Korn Ferry method alone is used by over half of the world's largest employers. These are not trivial systems. They are backed by decades of data and legal defensibility.
But here is the trap: the very granularity that makes these systems precise also makes them addictive. Once you have a tool that can distinguish between 800 and 920 "Hay points," organisations start treating that distinction as real. They create a grade boundary between the two. They build pay ranges around each grade. They design promotion criteria that require an employee to move from Grade 14 to Grade 15. And suddenly the system is producing 20, 25, or even 30 grades — each with its own salary band, its own title conventions, its own promotion logic.
The Korn Ferry materials themselves acknowledge this tension. Their own research shows that in a traditional manufacturing hierarchy, the distance between a manager and subordinate is typically two Hay steps, and that in flatter, delayered structures, it can stretch to four or more. Yet the grading system keeps producing fine-grained distinctions that the real organisational structure doesn't support.

What Jaques Saw That Others Missed
Elliott Jaques, the Canadian-born psychoanalyst and organisational theorist, spent over 35 years studying the same problem from a completely different angle. Where the consultancies asked "how do we measure the size of a job?", Jaques asked a more fundamental question: "what actually makes one job bigger than another, and where do the real boundaries lie?"
His answer was deceptively simple: time. Specifically, the longest time horizon of the tasks assigned to a role — what he called the "time span of discretion." A shop-floor operator working on tasks with a completion horizon of days occupies a fundamentally different stratum of work than a plant manager working on projects that take two years to complete, who is in turn in a different world from a CEO thinking 10–20 years ahead.
The critical insight was not just that work gets harder as you go up. It was that the increases in complexity are not smooth and continuous — they are discontinuous. Jaques found, across more than 100 studies in 20+ countries, that real managerial boundaries consistently emerge at the same time-span thresholds: roughly 3 months, 1 year, 2 years, 5 years, 10 years, and 20 years. These boundaries corresponded to qualitative shifts in the kind of thinking required, and not just more of the same.
This means that even the largest, most complex corporation needs at most seven genuine strata of work. Not seven grades but seven strata, each representing a real difference in the nature of the cognitive work being performed.

Where the Mismatch Hurts
The practical consequences of ignoring Jaques' insight are severe, and they are hiding in plain sight in most organisations.
Overlayering. When companies create two or three pay grades within a single stratum of work, they inevitably place a "manager" and a "subordinate" in the same cognitive layer but different grades. Jaques observed this phenomenon directly: subordinates in such situations report that the boss is "too close" and "breathing down their necks." The manager adds no real value because they are operating at the same level of problem complexity. The result is bypassing, buck-passing, and the classic symptoms of organisational dysfunction.
False career ladders. Moving from Grade 12 to Grade 13 feels exactly like a promotion but may involve no real increase in the scope or time horizon of work. Organisations fill the gaps between genuine strata with pseudo-promotions that inflate titles, inflate costs, and inflate expectations — without changing the fundamental nature of what people do.
In environments where people are especially attached to titles and grades (and let's be candid, this is true for most corporate environments), this dynamic turns into a status arms race: whoever has the higher grade wins. The grade becomes the trophy, not the work it is supposed to represent. This is particularly pronounced in cultures dominated by what William Torbert calls the Achiever action logic, or what Spiral Dynamics maps as Orange (with Red undertones): a mindset oriented toward competitive advancement, measurable wins, and visible markers of status. The tech industry is a prime example, where title inflation has become almost parodic — Google's individual contributor ladder runs from L3 to L11, producing distinctions like "Staff," "Senior Staff," "Principal," and "Distinguished" engineer, each mapped to its own compensation band. Many of these rungs exist not because the work demands a new stratum of thinking, but because the grading system needed another step. When the ladder is the reward, the organisation inevitably builds more ladder than it needs. The grading system, far from being a neutral measurement tool, becomes an accelerant for exactly the kind of vertical competition it should be channelling into productive work.
Administrative overhead. Each grade requires its own pay range, its own benchmarking, its own calibration exercise, its own appeals process. In a 25-grade system, the compensation team spends more time maintaining grade boundaries than actually thinking about whether people are paid fairly for the work they do.
Distorted market comparisons. When Company A has 20 grades and Company B has 15, mapping one structure onto the other becomes an exercise in creative fiction. The Mercer IPE-to-Hay correlation tables that circulate among compensation practitioners are guidelines at best — and the very need for such translation tables is itself evidence that the systems are measuring slightly different things while claiming universal validity.

The Consultancy Paradox
To be fair, the major consultancies are not unaware of this problem. Korn Ferry's own publications discuss "delayered structures" and "broadbanding." Mercer's IPE methodology explicitly groups its finer levels into broader career bands. AON's frameworks offer flexibility in how organisations cluster their evaluation outputs.
But there is a structural incentive problem. The more grades a system produces, the more an organisation depends on the consultancy for benchmarking data, for calibration support, for ongoing maintenance. Excessive complexity creates dependency. A model based on time-span analysis (seven strata at most, four or five for the majority of organisations) is elegant, powerful, and requires very little ongoing consulting support once implemented. That is not a compelling business model for a firm that bills by the project.
I am not suggesting cynicism on the part of the consulting firms. The people who work in these practices are serious professionals. But institutional incentives shape outcomes, and the incentive here runs against simplicity.
It is worth being candid about what would happen if Jaques's approach were widely adopted. A time-span-based model, once properly implemented, largely runs itself. It does not require annual recalibration workshops, proprietary software licences, or ongoing consultant involvement to adjudicate whether a role is a "strong 15" or a "weak 16." This makes it an existential threat not just to the grading consultancies, but to the entire compensation and benefits apparatus that has grown up around the complexity these systems produce. The C&B teams who have built their careers on maintaining 25-grade structures, the consultants whose engagement models depend on the next re-evaluation cycle, the survey providers whose products are organised around grade-based benchmarking — all of them have a powerful, if unspoken, reason to resist a framework that would make much of their work unnecessary. Expect Jaques' ideas to be dismissed as "too academic," "too simplistic," or "not practical for modern organisations." The arguments will be familiar. The motivation behind them is worth examining.

A Way Forward
The answer is not to discard job evaluation altogether. Comparing roles, benchmarking compensation, ensuring internal equity - these remain legitimate organisational needs. But the answer is to use evaluation as a tool in service of a structurally sound architecture, rather than letting the tool dictate the architecture.
In practice, this means starting with the question Jaques posed: how many real layers of work does this organisation actually need? For most companies, the answer is four or five. In our work across the GCC and beyond, we have seen structures with as many as fourteen nominal layers — and, in one memorable case, a matrix organisation where the reporting lines, spread across several pages of org charts, concealed the fact that certain individuals were, through a chain of dotted and solid lines, effectively reporting to themselves. (The matrix structure itself is a separate problem, deserving its own discussion another time.) The point is: the real number of strata is almost always far smaller than the grade count suggests. Each layer should represent a genuine discontinuity in the time horizon and cognitive complexity of the work, and not a 15% increment in Hay points.
Pay grades can then be organised within these strata (perhaps two or three grades per stratum for pay administration purposes), but with the clear understanding that a grade boundary within a stratum is not the same thing as a stratum boundary. The former is an administrative convenience. The latter is an organisational reality.
This also changes how we think about promotions. A real promotion, one that takes a person from one stratum to the next, is a fundamentally different event from a pay progression within a stratum. Conflating the two is one of the most expensive mistakes organisations make, both in direct compensation costs and in the confusion it creates about what leadership actually means at each level.

Beyond Grades: The Skills Dimension
Getting the structural architecture right is necessary, but it is not sufficient. There is a second challenge that the grading orthodoxy obscures entirely, and it is at least as consequential.
Traditional grading systems evaluate jobs. They do not evaluate what people can actually do. A Grade 16 Finance Manager and a Grade 16 Supply Chain Manager sit at the same level in the pay structure, but their skills are not interchangeable, and the organisation's need for those skills may be wildly different at any given moment. The grading system is blind to this. It tells you what a role is worth. It tells you nothing about the capabilities the organisation possesses, where they are concentrated, and where the critical gaps lie.
The emerging skill-based approach attempts to address this by shifting the unit of analysis from the job to the skill. Instead of asking "what grade is this position?", it asks "what can this person do, and what does the organisation need done?" In its most developed form, sometimes called internal talent marketplaces or "skills exchanges", this enables a fundamentally different way of deploying people: dynamic staffing based on the skills the organisation actually has, rather than on the boxes in an org chart.
The idea is powerful. The reality, so far, is mixed. Skills taxonomies have a tendency to metastasise, so what starts as a clean framework of 200 skills quickly balloons to 2,000, each requiring its own proficiency scale, its own validation method, its own market pricing. The very problem we identified with grades reappears in a different guise. And there is a deeper issue: without a sound structural architecture underneath, without knowing how many real strata of work the organisation needs, a skills-based model can become yet another elaborate measurement system layered on top of a fundamentally unclear organisational design.
The most promising path, in our experience, is to combine the two: use Jaques' strata to establish the structural architecture (how many real layers, and what kind of work belongs at each), and then use skills-based approaches within each stratum to understand what capabilities the organisation has, what it lacks, and how to deploy people where they create the most value. This is not a theoretical proposition. We work with organisations to build exactly this kind of framework; one that strips away the administrative barriers and makes visible the skills that are already present but buried under job titles, grade boundaries, and departmental silos. Most organisations are sitting on far more capability than they realise. The grading system, ironically, is one of the things preventing them from seeing it.

The Bottom Line
Job evaluation systems are measurement instruments. Like any instrument, they should describe reality, not create it. When a 25-grade structure produces organisational complexity that the underlying business does not need, the instrument has become the problem.
Jaques' work, for all its theoretical elegance, contains a deeply practical message: the real structure of accountability in any organisation is simpler than we think. The layers that matter are the ones where the nature of work genuinely changes (where the time horizon extends), where the problems become qualitatively different, and where a manager must be able to think in ways that their subordinates cannot yet access.
Everything else is administrative noise. And that noise has a cost: in payroll, in excessive complexity, in the talent that walks out the door because they see 23 rungs on a ladder and wonder whether the climb is worth it.

Authors:
Pavel Charny, ORTALEX, Managing Partner, Dubai