Your Organization: Work Hard To Understand It But Don’t Fight With It

Thanks to Clay Parker Jones for a thought-provoking article — The Organization Is Broken — about business organizations, past, present and future. The article says the traditional organization is no longer serving well as a vehicle to get work done in the new economy.  The author describes current examples of all sorts of models currently being tried with varying degrees of success.

I’m not sure about the best — or most likely — future direction for the American business company.  But it’s instructive to watch how the people who work there view the organization — as friend, foe, protector, obstacle or enabler — and how they see themselves in that picture.

Sometimes associates square off against the organization in one of a number of ways including:

1. Victims.  “This place’ll eat you up.”
2. Subverters. “We’ve tried stuff like that before and it’ll never work.”
3. Doom-sayers.  “This place is going down the tubes.”
4. Finger-Wagging “Change Agents.”  “There are lots of ‘silos’ and ‘broken processes.’  The only way to succeed is to change the culture.”
5. Machiavellians.  “Hmm. How will decision this impact my career path?”
6. Bidin’-my-time-‘ers.  “I’m just going to learn what I can here and move on.”

People come to work with all sorts of personal goals and ambitions, and it’s to be expected they will be to some extent frustrated in their attempts to fulfill them.  Some will view the company itself as the culprit.

An important job of management is to recognize when and where these attitudes prevail and to gently but firmly refocus people on the tasks at hand. What if instead of worrying about the organization and its culture, everyone considered it as just one of the many factors and constraints in their work life? Learn as much as possible about what it takes to get things done and assume the organization will change (or stagnate), for better and worse over time, as and when it responds to forces that affect it, many of which may not be foreseeable right now.

As a manager, take the opportunity to review every job in the place. Do people really understand how their roles relate to company goals? Use the points in our earlier article to sharpen up everyone’s roles and responsibilities, and spend time going over them with staff associates.

Despite all the talk about the changing nature of corporate organizations, it’s probably more productive to spend time and energy trying to understand your company as it is right now and learning how to get things done there than it is to worry about it, fight with it or try to change it.