Walk into most book stores, and look at the books on leadership that line the shelves, and you'll see very few that address the actual organizational structure of a business. If there are, the focus is primarily one measuring performance. And as valuable as these quality programs are, as change mechanisms, they are incremental at best.
The chief problem affecting organizational performance today is not the ability of people to perform, but the structure within which they do so.
This video is a snap shot of a conversation between two military officers. We have two cultures clashing in this conversation. One is the culture of the careerist who is a slave to the structure of the system. The other culture is of the leader who understands the organization's mission (which is not the perpetuation of the structure) and the leadership of the people who serve to achieve that mission.
If you are familiar with the HBO mini-series Generation Kill ( I highly recommend it.) you'll see these same two cultures colliding. You see the officer corps who are concerned about the unit's mission (which is in effect is reduced to their concerns about their own career advancement and longevity) and the NCO culture, where the concern is for the men who are charged with the dangerous mission that combat soldiers have.
The bureaucratic structure that constrains many large, complex organizations requires dramatic levels of change in order to function well in the future.
This image is one I've used before as a way to visualize a collaborative team working within a traditional hierarchical structure. Hierarchy does not necessarily exclude collaboration. Rather, when the system has turned in on itself to the point that the organization's mission is now the perpetuation the its structure, then you end up having the clash of cultures that is seen in the video.
The longer I work with issues affecting leaders the more convinced I am that structure is the last frontier of organizational development. There are three things to say about this.
1. The structure of an organization exists to serve the mission and the people who are employed to bring to fulfillment. It is a tool. Nothing more. To make it more brings it into conflict with the organization's mission. Yet, what I see is structure dictating what the mission should be, and how people are to function with in it. The structure of a business exists to facilitate the leadership of each individual member of the organization. By leadership, I mean the personal initiative that each person takes in collaboration with others to fulfill the mission of the organization.
2. Structure is ultimately determined by leadership. If a structure functions as it does in the animation above, then it is because the leadership of the system has allowed it to degenerate to that point. The relation between executive leadership and structure is a moral one. As a tool, structure serves a purpose. Just as a hammer can drive a nail into a board to build a house, it can also break a window to steal a briefcase from a car. The hammer remains what it is. It is the human use of that tool that determines its moral value.
3. Structures, not aligned with the organization's mission, and not open to the individual leadership of its members, will ultimately fail. There is no such reality that a structure is too big to fail. They are failing all around us. Evidenced by the disparities in compensation, high unemployment rates, and the inability of many organizations to adapt to a changing economic environment.
The Leadership Question for 2011.
As we begin a new year, I want to raise some questions that we all reflect upon during the coming year.
Is your business structure obsolete?
Are your employees reflecting enthusiams, independent initiative, collaborative decision-making and a passion for mission?
As the senior leader of your business, are you a liberating force for change or a careerist seeking to maximize your own personal benefit from a broken, declining system?
If any of these are true, then you need to take some time to consider what your alternatives are.
If every structure is just a tool, then resolve to determine what is the best tool to serve your business.
The challenge is before us all. The time to address these issues is now.
Great post. Form follows function, or at least it should. In business, it often doesn't.
Posted by: davidburkus | December 30, 2010 at 11:44 AM