Strict hierarchies worked in the early 1900’s. Now? Not so much. In fact, a lot of times they have the effect of stifling information, squelching innovation, stomping on organic leadership, and frankly, just ticking people off.
Don’t misunderstand what I’m saying here–I’m not advocating for rudderless organizations with no discernible leadership structures. Organizations need structure, and organizations need leaders. But when that exact structure begins to do more harm than good, you’ve at least got to consider blowing it up and building something that makes more sense.
Here are some questions you can ask yourself and/or your leadership team: How often do ideas get stuck in the pipeline? How does your current structure encourage–not just allow–people to take ownership of problems and create solutions? Underneath all the “we empower our employees” stuff, how empowered are they really? Do you have some sort of process or structure in place wherein employees can get their ideas heard? Do you think employees feel like it’s easy to get a real hearing for their ideas? Be honest: how scared are you to let employees take ideas, build on them, and make them happen without you holding (or tying) their hands? How does your structure encourage–not just allow–employees to step up and lead? Do you think your employees love working within the context you’ve built? Or do you think it’s more often a source of frustration?
The thing is–people generally want to do awesome work. Sometimes we just have to get out of their way and let them do it.
Here’s a game you should play w/ your firm’s management team: Reorg For Fun.
Split the exec team into two or three groups. Tell them to redesign the org structure. Tell them they have to say WHY their proposed structure is better than the current one, and what weaknesses of the current structure they’re fixing.
When they present, the other group(s) defend the current structure.
At the end of the session, all groups will laugh and realize how much better the current structure is to other alternatives. Or not. 🙂
What a cool idea. I love the potential for extraordinarily awkward moments. 🙂
Reading this I can’t help wondering what effect the current trend towards matrixed organizations is having on these issues. Even when their direct line manager might encourage this kind of risk taking, other influencers and dotted line project managers have their own opinions (or vice versa).
If you’ve yet to encounter the work of Kevin Carson, you need to read his opus. It really digs into some of the root reasons why hierarchies are failing and are only propped up in many case by force, with lots of practical applications as well as humor sprinkled throughout. Ultimately, we’re cooperatives, so we should strive to innovate around creating participatory, democratic, and horizontal workplace power structures…
How refreshing…takes me back to my formative years when someone really cool at Tesco defined empowerment as ‘ceasing to stop people’. This philosophy has been with me ever since. Whether it’s structures, processes or policies (from here on called ‘stuff’) they should be tested against the questions:
1/ does the ‘stuff’ we have come up with ‘stop’ people?
2/ did we come up with the ‘stuff’ to ‘allow’ our people or to serve us as managers?
Correct answers in the ‘stuff test’ are blindly obvious yet seldom seen; breathtaking simple yet dramatically overcomplicated by some. Get this stuff right and you will allow your people to do awesome work…simple really.