Organization Design: Designing Trust-Attracting Organizations
What is it?
Organization design is the skeleton of your organization. A good design supports a healthy flow of work, cash, people, and customers, while a bad design constricts these.
Every employee is entitled to have a competent manager who can bring value to their problem-solving and decision-making. Every manager is entitled to employees who can work effectively within their roles. Every organization is entitled to a working system for performance improvement and increased staff effectiveness.
Why does it matter?
In Mike’s research within organizations, the idea of trust, felt fairness, liberty, and being unencumbered to complete your work without somebody (or manipulative procedure) constricting you are what most people want from their employer.
Trust Attracting Organization:
Organizations with creativity and good feelings generate trust, truth, fairness, justice, friendliness, openness, mutual help, and regard.
Trust Repelling Organization:
Organizations that generate the negative aspects of human nature – autocratic coercion, greed, malice, secrecy, and self-seeking – are inhibitors of imagination, innovation, and creative effort.
What are the areas of focus?
- Do we have a philosophy for how work gets done within the organization?
- What is our current hierarchy and organization chart?
- Does our current organization chart and philosophy match to achieve quality outcomes?
- Does our current organization chart accurately reflect how work gets done?
- How does our current organization design support or constrict our communication, innovation, and people completing great work?
- Where in our current organization design are we creating unneeded or redundant work?
- How can we change our organization’s design to increase what is working well and decrease what is not working well?
How will you make progress?
- Faster, better-informed decision-making.
- Lower costs by decreasing approval layers
- Managers who know what to do, when, and why
- Employees who can focus on the work by doing their best
- Faster reactions to change, thanks to a workforce that know their jobs and how they can add value