Meets tight deadlines at a single bound

One requirement that seems almost to write itself into all unsuspecting Job Descriptions is "The Ability to Meet Tight Deadlines"

Unsurprisingly, in response, candidates for jobs are universally compelled to guarantee that they can do this. Some probably can.

But why should a job require people to be facing tight deadlines routinely? Yes, some jobs, such as ambulance driver, really do require things to be done quickly at short notice. Yes, most jobs would expect occasionally to have urgent situations requiring 'all hands on deck'. Reasonable people respond positively to occasional short term crises where they work. It would seem unnecessary to have to contract them to do so.

For it be necessary to specify that an essential and every day aspect of a job is meeting tight deadlines suggests that there may actually be a serious problem in the workplace. 

Is the author of the Job Description really admitting that they are incapable of managing workflow?  Or worse, that they cannot be bothered to manage workflow?

Actually achieving deadlines at short notice does not necessarily benefit the person concerned. In fact, it can have serious disadvantages in that it can train the person's manager to present requests at short notice increasingly. 

In order to train your manager to manage their own workflow better, it may be beneficial to fail to meet tight deadlines. But this approach obviously has high risk. A better solution might be to develop a 'deadline audit tool' which would be used whenever an agreed threshold of 'deadline tightness' was reached. 

Such a tool employed routinely across an organisation would expose, and thereby quickly eliminate, the problems in workflow management. For example, those situations where a task presented to one person with a "by tomorrow without fail" timescale had actually been sitting on the another's desk for the previous six weeks. 

Edgar Bolton. 2013