The IllumiLab is excited to bring you this blog series from guest contributor Chelsea Weber. Chelsea has over a decade of experience in organizational design, development, and transformation with private, government, and nonprofit organizations. The IllumiLab’s mission is to equip and empower change-makers to plan thoughtfully, design intentionally, work efficiently, and learn continuously. Organizational design is the bedrock of all those capacities! Take it away, Chelsea . . .
“We believe that the vast majority of people go to their jobs each day wanting to contribute to the mission of the organization they work for. Too often, however, the organization is a barrier to, not an enabler of, individual efforts.” ~Amy Kates and Jay Galbraith, Designing Your Organization
We know that many of you have had your individual efforts stymied by organizational issues. For example:
- Leaders at the top of mission driven organizations join meeting after meeting, trying to pull together information to make good decisions or react to something internal. Unfortunately, they find themselves without the time to really set priorities or strategize.
- Staff members are caught in an endless loop of bumpy hand-off processes between teams, making it difficult to meet stakeholder needs.
- Managers lose countless hours trying to clear up confusion between (and among) teams about who does and decides what. Meanwhile, critical work gets duplicated, re-done, or dropped.
Most non-profits are people-driven, relying on often herculean (and unsustainable) levels of individual effort. When there’s trouble, the solutions also focus on the people. We replace a leader, “communicate more,” retrain a team, manage this individual’s attitude, rally everyone around a growth mindset … you know the drill. We don’t stop to ask whether the people have the support or clarity they need, wonder what’s blocking them, and work to make those things better.
What if I told you that organizations struggling with these challenges are getting exactly the results they’re designed for?
Organizational Design is More Than You Think
When I say “organizational design” to people, their minds usually go to the org chart: The little drawing of where people sit in the hierarchy and who manages whom. Boxes and lines. But this chart tells us very little about how work actually gets done.
Every organization has structures, processes, and practices that (should) enable people to achieve its purpose or strategic goals. All of this is your organization’s design. These designs shape behavior – they determine how quickly you can make decisions, how long it takes to carry out an event or deliver something vital to constituents, even how engaged or empowered your employees feel. Whether these systems and practices were intentionally designed or they evolved haphazardly, they have the same impact.
What aspects of your organization’s design are impacting the way you carry out your strategy and pursue your mission?
- How the organization has defined and distinguished roles and responsibilities
- How leaders have organized teams and given them authority to do their best work
- Processes and agreements for making big and small decisions (often implicit, but very much in play)
- Systems for sharing information (e.g. everything lives in a private folder on a desktop, shared documents in G Drive, etc.)
- Methods of collaborating and sharing work between teams/roles (e.g. “over the fence” project passing from team to team, meeting rhythms and styles, shared documents worked on asynchronously)
- Communication systems (e.g. email vs. Slack, meetings for information sharing)
- The way you monitor and update your strategy (e.g annual reviews, continuously updated and open metrics, quarterly leadership meetings, etc.)
- The way people are incentivized/rewarded for their work (e.g compensation, recognition, opportunity)
- Even more!
Organizational Design in Action
Here’s an example of how a few things in that list can show up. An organization’s purpose is to deliver healthcare services to vulnerable populations, and it is struggling to intake new patients in a timely and effective manner. Community health workers fill out intake forms for new patients, but they can’t make any decisions about the care new patients receive. One department manages that intake form. They email it to various departments that might be related to the patients’ needs.
These departments are siloed according to funding streams. Those departments go back and forth with the intake department (who then reaches out to the community health workers to clarify information) to determine whether they can take on patient needs. Each department then reaches out separately to patients. The head of the department that owns the intake form makes the final decision about where each new patient goes first. No one else understands how to prioritize which needs to meet first. The patient bounces around between several teams before landing with one who can help them.
Perhaps you can see how no amount of individual effort in this scenario will help things work better. The bumpy processes, unclear authority and roles, and boundaries between teams add up like debt. This all turns into countless hours making decisions, high stress and low psychological safety due to ambiguity and confusion, and lost opportunity to have an impact. And who feels those consequences? The staff. New patients. Team leaders. Everyone.
Start Noticing Design
The best leaders treat organizational design as an ongoing effort. They pay attention to how the work gets done and are adept at seeing how big and small design choices impact their people and the goals of the organization.
If you can think like a designer, you can adapt when it’s necessary and build things that work – not just live with the stuff you inherited and blame people when those designs no longer serve your aims.
That’s your homework – start looking at patterns, processes, and habits in your organization through a design lens. What were the choices that led us here? What are we assuming to be true about “the way things get done” that might just be old designs that we’ve never questioned? Given the impact we’re trying to have, what needs to be different?
In my next post, we’ll go deeper into an overall approach to organizational design. We will answer the question “Ok, I can see the old designs…now how do I go about changing it?”