Times They Are A Changing…#3

More About How We Move To An Alternate Organizing Design?

Let's say it’s Monday morning, a new day, a new week, and the organization, group or team already has a routine, an already established way of doing things. If we are to move to a new organizing design something has to change – we need to start doing some things differently.

In my last post I proposed an overview of some key steps  – a 30,000 ft. view, if you will. Every time I have had this conversation with a tem of executives there is usually agreement at the level of the model or framework – mostly everyone agrees it all makes sense – the question is usually, yes, we need to do things differently, but where’s the best place for us to make a start?

The best place to look for an answer…the answer for you…is to start with the areas where you have the most complaints or dissatisfactions. Here are some that make it to the top of most lists:

1.     We have too many meetings, and they mostly don’t help to get things done

2.     How do we deal with, “It’s not my job”?  Then who is accountable/responsible for…[fill in the black]?

3.     How do we surface and deal with day-to-day tensions, persistent complaints and the inevitable conflicting priorities?

4.     How do we give/get feedback so we are continually improving instead of being frustrated with each other when our expectations are not being met?

5.     We say we want innovation, creativity and breakthroughs, yet we spend all our time on business-as-usual, how do we break that cycle?

TIP: Pick one area at a time to go to work on:

1. If it a process that needs to be changed, do you have standard operating procedure to change processes? If yes, use it to cause the needed changes. If no, job #1 is design the mechanism you will use to change and improve processes – how do you do it; who get to decide; how are changes shared…?
2. If it is a behavior/habit that needs to be changed, don’t try and fix the behavior/habit, create a new practice that will displace the behavior/habit that you don't want.
3. As you notice things to work on, keep asking, “What role should have the accountability/authority/responsibility to attend to this?” Make sure that every activity, everything you are working on, belongs to a role. More about that later, and in subsequent posts.

Creating Roles – A Key Design Element

In the emergent, distributed decision-making model – the context for what I am talking about in this series of blogs – every person in the organization, group and team has a role, more likely a set of roles – each person acts like an entrepreneur, Founder/CEO within their role(s) exercising their authorities to execute their accountabilities.

Roles may well be grouped in categories, like R&D, IT, marketing, finance, and business development, however the expectation is that people will have roles in more than one category. This is the most effective way to get out of the silo/functional mindset most of us have been trained and steeped in during our careers.

The key design elements of a role include:

1. An activity expressed as verbs ending in –ing. See some examples below. In subsequent post I will give examples of companies who are advocates of this approach and do this well
2. That activity is expressed as an accountability, so that the expectations of everyone in the organization, group, team are clear
3. With specific responsibilities
4. Specific decision-making authorities [that no one can trump without violating the authority of the role]
5. All while meeting the expectation of other role holders.

A role holder can have roles in different functions of an organization/group/team.

A role is different from a task in a job description, or a job description in total, mostly because job descriptions to not include all the design elements of a role.

 A few examples of roles:

1. Finding new prospective customers
2. Converting prospective customers to customers
3. Responding to customers’ questions is a role that someone(s) needs to be accountable for, with particular responsibilities, specific decision-making authorities, while meeting the expectations of other roles.
4. Preparing and disseminating regular performance updates
5. Capturing and disseminating new knowledge

The ongoing intention is to keep expressing every element of work as a role, or part of a role, and assigning roles to someone who is willing to be responsible for all the elements required for the performance of that role.

More about designing and managing roles in upcoming posts.