When working through organization design issues with my clients, their number one question is “How do we design for change? How do we create adaptable and agile organizations that can execute, but not become so entrenched that they miss oncoming disruption?” No leader (good or bad) out there today would challenge the adage of “change is a constant,” but when putting together the elements of an organization, those same leaders tend to lean towards structures that are immobile and risk obsolescence as soon as operationalized.
Good organization design, as we have discussed before on other posts, has several tenets to it.
- It must take into account the environment in which it will exist, be strategy-driven.
- Be holistic in nature.
- Consider the trade-offs that are inherent in creating a people-dependent system.
But even when adhering to those tenets, organization designs are likely to be stagnant; more fit for the PowerPoint slides on which they are captured than appropriate for a dynamic business. So how do we design for a business that faces shifts, challenges, and opportunities from its marketplace, its stakeholders, and its employees on a day-to-day basis?
One of the core components of design work is defining the specific roles within an organization. Those who have spent hours (or days!) defining functional families, building job descriptions, defining career paths, and wrestling through RACIS understand that this work is critical to making sure people understand how they fit into a design and what their individual contributions should be.
As a design relates to role defining, there is a trend to emphasize the terms “steward” and “stewardship” to help those who will be in those roles understand that they don’t “own” it (the organization and its work) but are responsibly caretaking or tending to resources (people, capital, property, etc.) so that those resources are sustained and even bettered for the future. This concept is an important one for building flexible and agile systems, but it still falls short. That shortfall is rooted in the most fundamental of definitions of steward, which is an Old English verb from the early 17th century initially created as “stīweard, from stig (probably in the sense ‘house, hall’) + weard ‘ward’.”
While the concept of caretaking of resources for the betterment of a community makes sense and can help drive flexibility in our systems, the root of “stig,” or hall, shows us the rigidity that we build into organizations. We need to also give their inhabitants and leaders the clear vision that, while structure is essentially built with walls, they are meant to be moved, adjusted, or torn down if necessary. What would it take, in practical terms, to bring flexibility to walls in organizations? Potentially the following would help:
- Provide regular forums to assess and adjust the seams between functions/teams: Organize working sessions that figure out whether the walls between functions’ work are effective. Do they have clear communication? Are the walls permeable and foster the in-take of changing requirements? Use these sessions to encourage open dialogue on the boundaries of each team and what they require of each other in order to deliver organization outputs. Surface shifts and changes required for better outputs from the bottom up — reward innovation on process changes and work ownership shifts that lead to more productivity.
- Lead with what matters: Reiterate the company’s vision and founding principles at the start of every conversation. Bring customer and external feedback into every meeting in a way that asks the question, “what if we…instead of…?” Ask what value we are building for future generations or customers, shareholders, and employees. Link those ideas and suggestions about tomorrow to the core principles that should remain unwavering, rather than to existing structure and walls.
- Cultivate inclusivity: Use every new hire, promotion, and transition in leadership or employee base to ask “what do you think?” Instead of creating a “90-day” onboarding to teach new leaders about the existing walls, leverage their fresh eyes on the value in today’s work versus the value needed tomorrow. Have them speak to what they’ve seen work, rather than talk about how you’d like them to work within your walls.
- Tie rewards to progress, not to keeping walls intact: One of the biggest challenges to a flexible and agile organization is deciding what we tie rewards to and how we pay people. Find a way to incent people to come together and solve the problems of tomorrow while still meeting the production demands of today. Think not about variable pay and base, but pay for today and pay for the future.
To be truly be organizational stewards, we must be focused on creating a more cooperative environment that goes beyond our walls and ultimately stewards the whole of our organization. These cross-functional, cross-boundary collaborations will truly make our organizations adaptable to change.