Earlier this month McKinsey & Company published an article entitled “Getting Organization Design Right”. It was (of course) well researched and well written. It’s a very good primer on why organization design matters, and offers senior executives 9 “Golden Rules” for getting organization design.
Of particular interest to us here at COREinternational was Rule #3 – “Be structured about selecting the right blueprint”. We couldn’t agree more.
Unfortunately though the McKinsey piece fell short of describing how to clearly articulate your organization’s blueprint, while at the same time relating that the approaches most prevalent are “gut feel”.
The “seems right” approach fits well with our experience. All too often senior executives look to other organizations (“How are our competitors organized?”) or history (“In my last role, we organized by…”). Both of these approaches are not effective because the information they bring to the current design challenges is both outdated and irrelevant.
Of course, we do have a perspective on the best set of design principles to use when designing your organization — they are embedded in our approach to design, which, when implemented properly, results in what we call an Accountability Based Management System.
Our design system rests on the foundation of organizational and human behavioural research that has been field tested and proven for over 50 years. It is simple yet powerful, and it offers an organizing paradigm that results in clear accountability, distributed authority, and making sure the right people are doing the right work at the right level.
We are frequently asked: “What is the best organization design for my organization?”, as if there is an off-the-shelf design that can be “tweaked” and installed to solve a design challenge.
The answer to the “right” organizational design, is that it is the design that distributes accountability and authority clearly, matches roles at the right level with people who are capable of operating at the level of their role, and minimizes “noise in the system”. In other words, as the McKinsey article points out, there is no off-the-shelf solution. Your organization’s design needs to be as unique as your organization (and the people who make it up) itself. Organizations, we are fond of saying, are complex, dynamic, HUMAN systems.
As for the other 8 rules McKinsey mentions, our approach to organization design and implementation embeds them all.
The McKinsey article can be found here. And for more on our approach to organization design and implementation, click here.