The First 90 Days (38 page)
Authors: Michael Watkins
Tags: #Success in business, #Business & Economics, #Decision-Making & Problem Solving, #Management, #Leadership, #Executive ability, #Structural Adjustment, #Strategic planning
Designing Organizational Architecture
Begin by thinking of yourself as the architect of your unit or group. This may be a familiar role for you, but it probably isn’t. Few managers get systematic training in organizational design. Because managers typically have limited control over organizational design early in their careers, they learn little about it. It is commonplace for less-senior people to complain about misalignments and to wonder aloud why “those idiots” higher up let obviously dysfunctional arrangements continue. By the time you reach the mid-senior levels of most organizations, however, you are well on your way to becoming one of those idiots. You are therefore well advised to begin learning something about how to assess and design organizations.
[1]
To equip your group to achieve its goals, five elements of organizational architecture all need to work together:
Strategy:
The core approach the organization will use to accomplish its goals
Structure:
How people are situated in units and how their work is coordinated
Systems:
The processes used to add value
Skills:
The capabilities of the various groups of people in the organization
Culture:
The values, norms, and assumptions that shape behavior Certainly, you need a focused strategy to move forward effectively. But misalignments among
any
of these five elements can make even the best strategy useless. Strategy drives the other elements
and
is influenced by them. For example, if you decide to change your group’s strategy, you will probably have to alter its structure, systems, and skills to support the new plan. As
figure 6-1
shows, clarifying your strategy and aligning the supporting elements have to go hand in hand.
Figure 6-1:
Elements of Organizational Architecture
[1]This is an adaptation of the well-known McKinsey “7-S” organizational analysis framework. See R. H. Waterman, T.
J. Peters, and J. R. Phillips, “ Structure Is Not Organization,”
Business Horizons,
1980. For an overview, see “
Organizational Alignment: The 7-S Model,” Case 9-497-045 (Boston: Harvard Business School, 1996). The seven S’s are strategy, structure, systems, staffing, skills, style, and shared values.
Identifying Misalignments
Organizations can end up misaligned in many ways. Your goal during your first 90 days should be to identify potential misalignments and then design a plan for correcting them. Common types of misalignment include the following:
Skills and strategy misalignment.
Suppose you head an R&D group and your goal is to increase the number of new product ideas your team generates. However, your group does not understand the latest techniques and support tools that would let you run more experiments faster than before. In this case, your group’s skills do not support its strategy.
Systems and strategy misalignment.
Imagine that you lead a marketing group whose strategy is to focus on a new customer segment. If the group has not established an effective way to compile and analyze information about those customers, your group’s systems fail to support its strategy.
Structure and systems misalignment.
Suppose you manage a product development group whose members are organized by product line. The rationale for this structure is that it focuses specialized technical expertise on specific products. But this structure has a downside: The group does not have efficient systems for integrating the overlapping expertise of different product teams. The resulting mismatch between structure and systems would make it difficult for the entire group to perform optimally.
