Organisation design for the 21st century
Rethinking organisation design
Restructuring is rife once again in our organisations. Is all this really necessary or are we just getting it very wrong? Do we keep designing in the traditional and two dimensional way we have always designed our organisations in?
Let us rethink why we would restructure in the first place and how we would do it in a way that is more sustainable and less disruptive to the organisation.
Let’s start with some simple ideas and principles.
Include organisation design as part of your strategic planning process. When your business model or value chain changes, your overall structure needs to change with it. For other times, accountabilities and roles need to continually evolve.
Create broad roles that can evolve, not tightly defined jobs. Remember we frequently encounter problems beyond our job descriptions and we need to develop people so they can be redeployed.
When you restructure, change the way the work is done or there will be no change.
Functions focused on effectiveness cannot report to functions focused on efficiency
Functions focused on long-range development cannot report to functions focused on short-range results
Having the wrong people in the wrong roles will continue to make the structure ineffective.
Understand that there will always be paradoxes in the system like centralisation AND decentralisation and learn to manage it through behaviour rather than structure. No amount of restructuring can make up for leadership and culture failures. Restructures often don’t change power structures.
People like creating extra layers to serve their own agendas. Do not allow it if the business model and value chain does not require it.
Let’s improve how we do things using 4 fundamentals.
1. Job families based on the value chain – broken down into core and support
The first step is to design value chain based job families - a job family is a cluster of roles that have a lot in common as far as competencies and outputs are
Restructuring is rife once again in our organisations. Is all this really necessary or are we just getting it very wrong? Do we keep designing in the traditional and two dimensional way we have always designed our organisations in?
Let us rethink why we would restructure in the first place and how we would do it in a way that is more sustainable and less disruptive to the organisation.
Let’s start with some simple ideas and principles.
Include organisation design as part of your strategic planning process. When your business model or value chain changes, your overall structure needs to change with it. For other times, accountabilities and roles need to continually evolve.
Create broad roles that can evolve, not tightly defined jobs. Remember we frequently encounter problems beyond our job descriptions and we need to develop people so they can be redeployed.
When you restructure, change the way the work is done or there will be no change.
Functions focused on effectiveness cannot report to functions focused on efficiency
Functions focused on long-range development cannot report to functions focused on short-range results
Having the wrong people in the wrong roles will continue to make the structure ineffective.
Understand that there will always be paradoxes in the system like centralisation AND decentralisation and learn to manage it through behaviour rather than structure. No amount of restructuring can make up for leadership and culture failures. Restructures often don’t change power structures.
People like creating extra layers to serve their own agendas. Do not allow it if the business model and value chain does not require it.
Let’s improve how we do things using 4 fundamentals.
1. Job families based on the value chain – broken down into core and support
The first step is to design value chain based job families - a job family is a cluster of roles that have a lot in common as far as competencies and outputs are