Using measurable results and purposeful investments in organizational effectiveness to deliver on your strategy.
Several CEOs we have spoken with over the past few months are very concerned about engagement, empowerment, they want their people to have the resilience and fortitude to not get overwhelmed by change fatigue. What these CEOs are missing is that they can create the desired environment by establishing an effective management system.
People want to be on a winning team, and know they are part of that result. So put down the latest engagement survey results and think about these three things that will drive returns from your investments in organizational effectiveness, and your people.
- Align your organization structure to the business strategy. Ensure you have the right number of levels and work is taking place at the right level. The value to your company is $1,000,000 for every 715 jobs. Why? Because 56% of roles are typically misaligned where role holders are not doing the important work those roles were created to do. These are known as jam-ups and gaps. For each misaligned job, there is at least $2500 per year of inefficient work being done in terms of duplicate work, re-work, delays to due to misunderstandings, slow or delayed decisions, and poor communication.
- Use Cognitive Processing Capability assessment as your basis of performance potential. Do people in critical roles have the cognitive capability to do the work? With all work being the exercise of judgement in using tools, methods, and resources to achieve a task within a given time frame, this factor is the single most important factor in ability to perform work. In general, better selection assessment can get you as much as 30% of that job’s salary in terms of higher productivity, better decision-making, creative problem-solving, addressing ambiguity, working effectively in new situations not encountered before and simply handling enough variables to address increasingly complex problems and situations. So for every $1,000,000 of payroll, selection based oncogintive assessment can return an additional $300,000 in value .. Cognitive processing capability is both objective and predictive. This is priceless, because you cannot really know what is coming next. You will have greater certainty that your team has the wherewithal to handle the next level of challenge.
- It is important to Get clear and committed on using “three-tier management” accountabilities—employee, manager, and manager –once-removed (MoR or manager of managers) We are generally clear on how a manager is different from employees who are not manager. A manager of managers has different accountabilities with respect to employees, two levels down. The focus of the work of an MoR is on talent identification, development, and selection and ensuring the organization will achieve its goals. Yes, that sounds like HR work. It is management stuff that has all too often abdicated to HR. It is the stuff that feeds into all those HR processes, forms and systems which actually make those investments worthwhile (and NOT extra work to comply with). It also gets rid of the variability of risk of personal style and increases the consistency of culture. This builds trust and engagement by supporting performance and winning teams. The ROI here is about 20% increase in productivity after about 12 to 18 months of consistent practice.
These three things are simple and, though not easy, readily accomplished. They provide proven returns on your investments in organizational effectiveness. Most importantly they increase the certainty that your organizational design will deliver your strategy, and reduces the risk that you won’t.
How certain are you that your organization design will deliver your business plan?