Five Fundamentals from the Heart on Designing Effective Organizations

Leaders face many challenges in designing effective organizations. Leadership, purpose, and environment are among the enduring organizational practice areas requiring attention and consideration. These areas promote organizational innovation, the raison d’être of all significant commercial enterprises. Among the organizational improvement areas is the topic of structure, at times referred to as organization design, architecture, or landscape. These distinctions, often important in academic circles, also demonstrate biases in approach and to ways of engaging organizational change and improvement.Executive teams frequently enter design discussions as a symptomatic response to deeper underlying and unresolved performance issues or as a response to a combination of unresolved issues. These significant issues typically involve failures to align on strategic goals, an inability of executives to foster inclusion through teamwork, or a leadership crisis. However, effective design work, lasting over a period of five to six months, serves as a catalyst to building increasingly effective relationships among senior peers, fosters inclusion, and results in leadership development.Five central themes require attention in designing an effective organization while attending to companion performance concerns. Attention-focusing practices in these areas result in hardy outcomes, supporting organizational growth and development. Rich dialogue and other data considerations are essential to sustain effective discipline in applying these five principles to design.Stop Before StartingGlee often accompanies initial discussions on design. It may be part of an inherent desire to fix things, to make things better, and to bring order out of chaos. As design discussions continue, fatigue for the challenges ahead sets in, resulting in undesirable practices, including second-guessing, reluctance, and confusion. Leadership teams confront realities imposed by employment authorities and resistant-to-change organizational policies bringing both benefit and detriment to innovation. Elsewhere, it’s been remarked that organization design, or redesign, is akin to a leadership team changing the tires on an automobile while it is in motion. Approaching design discussions begins with awareness and desire infused with care, compassion, and commitment to both community and society. All effective approaches to organizational design initiate with stocktaking and reflection that fuels thoughtful and transparent commitment to creating productive and meaningful workplaces.Strategy and GoalsAfter stopping to start, strategy and goals will be the first checkpoint in any discussion of design. Professor Albert Chandler identified the linear relationship, beginning with strategy, then to structure, and progressing to behavior that provides a memorable framework for decisions related to structure. Structure is a response to organizing task behavior of the organization, and those tasks are in service of organizational strategy and goals. Beginning with strategy promotes healthy organization of task activity in service of strategic goals. In addition, effective designs promote behaviors institutionally responsive to design. Structures will make differences in attracting talent that serves and advances organizational interests.Top Team AlignmentThe process of team alignment is fostered through design discussions. When teamwork is encouraged, senior leaders can form as a dominant coalition to shape the environment in ways that promote organizational effectiveness. As senior leaders consider the organization as an object for improvement, with appropriate leadership, senior leaders may also find themselves as the subject of improvement. Consequently, some designs, lauded for their significance by senior leaders, often amount to much of nothing for some, as the informal systems and culture of the organization prove resilient in the face of scaled change. Top team alignment in these discussions has the desirable benefit of clarifying roles, improving decision-making, and fostering professional commitment.Service and Self-InterestMost discussions of structure raise personal as well as organizational interests. In this case, senior leaders are encouraged to exercise their political skills and avoid leaving others to guess or speculate about their intention. If there was ever a case for transparency, given the impact of structural change on performance, individuals, and families, structure provides the case. Senior leaders should come to the table with bias and perspective and a desire to meet, head-on, the challenges inherent in producing successful outcomes and results. This might include confronting do-more-with-less environments or, more astutely, to the effective stewarding of resources.Design PrinciplesSuccessful design outcomes begin with an end in mind. Those outcomes result from a deliberative process that incorporates other principles identified in these lessons from the field. Effective identification of design principles resonates with organizational values and promotes what leaders believe about the ability of talent to deliver results that matter. A list of design principles needs to be specific, to address current and historical challenges, and have the ability to take the organization into the future. Flexibility, agility, and the ability of a system to heal and to learn may guide some of the newer network forms that are emerging and require creativity and enthusiasm of leaders.Design has its rewards, encompassing the potential to celebrate the human spirit, the beauty of organization, and bringing products and services to the world that make a difference. Senior leaders work can work creatively and meaningfully on the process that sustains innovation, turning energy into the unique transformation of environmental inputs into desirable products and services.