Creating a High Performance Organization is How Organizations Should Work
Board Directors and CEO’s have an aligned responsibility to ensure that a company has a strong strategy aligned for growth. CEO’s have the responsibility to ensure that they create a compelling vision to align priorities to create a high performing organization and implement the board’s approved growth strategy.
Sounds straight forward. But it’s not.
Leading organizational design experts, like Dean Meyer, in his most recent book, How Organizations Should Work, has a modular approach that provides a helpful guide for leading complex transformational changes, but he also identifies seven principles of organizational structure that must be synchronized and continually calibrated to maximize growth.
Principle 1: Empowerment: The Golden Rule – this is all about ensuring authority and accountabilities match.
Principle 2: Specialization and Teamwork – You can only be world-class at one thing at a time, but you can specialize if you cannot team.
Principle 3: Precise Domains: Define clear boundaries with no overlaps or gaps.
Principle 4: Basis for Sub-Structure: Divide a function into sub-groups based on what its supposed to be good at.
Principle 5: Avoid Conflicts of Interests : Don’t expect people to go in two opposing directions.
Principle 6: Cluster by Professional Synergies: Cluster groups under a common boss based on similar professions.
Principle 7: Business within a Business: Every group is defined as a business whose job is to satisfy customers, internal and external) with products and services.
This blog will only look closely at the first principle as it is so imperative to get right, and this is the area I see so many boards and C-Suite leaders struggling with.
First, empowerment is a well-used term in business, but when you dig deep into how employee’s often feel – they are not soaring with incredible agility, speed and space. Sadly, most employees do not feel engaged or empowered. Business units with engaged workers have 23% higher profit, while employees who are not engaged cost the world $7.8 trillion in lost productivity, equal to 11% of global GDP.
A study at a British telecommunications firm run by Oxford University's Saïd Business School found that happy workers were 13% more productive. That research tracked 1,800 workers and their personal feelings of happiness over a series of weeks.
Leadership Questions:
- What could your business do if every single team member was 13% more productive?
- What is your organizational strategy to ensure empowerment and employee engagement are best practices?
Unlocking motivation of employees to lead from a sense of genuine empowerment is a business imperative if leaders want their organizations to work efficiently and effectively.
A few pointers on empowerment discussed in Myer’s book, are:
- “ Don’t create one organization box that tell’s another box how to do their job.”
- Using the word ensure should be only used to refer to ourselves never other people. No one is in the business of ensuring other people’s behaviours.
- Never separate learning from doing, and no one imposes innovation on anyone.
- Each function/operating group delivers current products and invests to create next generation products or improvements
Foundational concepts engrained into these empowerment pointers is the elevated inspiration to think beyond invokes a sense of freedom and taps into entrepreneurial skills like: curiosity, courage and collaboration.
The next two blogs in this series focus on the leadership behaviours to create an entrepreneurial culture where a business within a business mindset flourishes.
