How can leaders architect their organization for success?
Spoiler: Starting with an organizational chart isn’t the answer. Achieving your organization’s strategic goals requires intentionally designing the right structures, systems, processes, and roles that complement your culture and work together to optimize your people’s strengths and capabilities. To do this, leaders need to understand their organization’s current state relative to its strategy (through assessment and analysis), identify critical capabilities needed to get there, and create and activate an implementation plan through ongoing change management, communication, and operational support.
The experts in this EXLEARN Talks episode discuss how leaders can influence organizational design and share a framework for approaching this work with intention. They provide insight on the following questions:
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- 6:27: How did you know when your organization needed a more intentional design approach? What were the symptoms, pain points, or desired benefits that compelled your organization to invest in organizational design work?
- 8:54: What are the most common triggers that lead to organizational design work?
- 11:20: Whether it was intentional or not, every organization is “living in” a design. What does it feel like when your organization’s design doesn’t support the company’s strategic goals?
- 15:47: What is organizational design?
- 20:57: How do you pitch organizational design work to other leaders at your company?
- 25:38: What does organizational design work look like? Does it follow a process?
- 34:24: What kind of activities can help teams start this work?
- 41:07: How do you implement your organizational design? What does the implementation planning process look like?
- 49:41: Do you have any advice for how people can get started in this work?
- 53:37: How do you create a positive mentality among your team amid so much change during organizational restructuring?
Highlights from the Panelists:
“[When having conversations in your organization] about transformation, growth, and evolution, we tend to think we can do those things without changing the structure of the organization. To make significant change in the business…we can get the strategy right but then we need to start thinking about the organizational design to support it and to propel it.”
– Gina Max, CHRO and SVP at Knauf Insulation
“This is all about the leaders’ vision of where [they want the organization] to go. Every organization [has] its own thumbprint, and what [your organization needs] is going to be different than [what a competing organization] needs. [And because] the needs are different, the dynamics and outcomes need to be different. [How] the leaders are defining the business needs should drive [the organizational design], not what some other competitor or admired company might do.”
– Carol Henriques, Principal at TiER1 Performance
A Visual Capture of the Discussion:
Designed by Ramsey Ford
