Why don’t more people use the organization’s structure effectively?
I find myself asking this question frequently about corporate, private, public, and nonprofit institutions.
Leaders create carefully manicured organizational charts with clear divisions, departments, and leadership hierarchies. They thoroughly vet and carefully select the best talent to lead and staff those subsets. And then, they completely ignore it all, choosing instead either micromanagement of every detail or complete laissez-faire leadership.
I used to teach organizational structure in every class I taught – not by choice! In fact, for years I did a very, very poor job of explaining how structures, departments, and management spans of control work…because I didn’t understand it either!
But a lightbulb went off one day when I was reading Daniel Levitin’s The Organized Mind. I took the concepts I gleaned from his book back to class that semester and delivered a lecture on organizational structure that I’m still proud of today. And then I became a fanatic about this topic.
Structure exists to give direction, to bring order to the chaos, and to prevent everyone from just doing their own uncoordinated thing. Structure exists so the organization looks like it knows what it’s doing (bonus points if its members actually do!). Structure exists to give people opportunities to be involved, to take ownership, to execute in coordination on critically important tasks, and to shine when they excel. And structure exists to ensure that steps aren’t missed or skipped and that all parties are accountable for completing what they said they would.
When leaders violate their own structures by either not caring or caring too much about unimportant things, it all falls apart. And once it falls apart, trust disintegrates, and work quality suffers.
Structure is not there to look pretty on the chart. It’s there to coordinate work and prevent poor coordination. Be careful not to undermine your structure. Give people the support necessary to do their work well, then get out of their way and let the structure guide their execution.
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