A how-to guide for designing a healthy and long-term performant organization which enables people to act focused and independently in the organizations best interest.
Both leaders and employees prefer work to be autonomus, meaning that everyone feel empowered to solve problems themselves without having to rely on others.
However, if the autonomy is not tethered to anything, it will just produce a lot of activity and not a lot of progress. This is where alignment comes into play.
The keys to aligned autonomy are role clarity and goal clarity.
Last week my daughter peeked into my home office to ask me to open a can of tomatoes. The pandemic meant she was being home schooled (or rather, was home schooling herself), and her home ec assignment was to cook tomato soup from scratch.
Both her, my wife and I were working from home, so I don't know whether she had tried to ask my wife first. Had my wife been available, I'm sure she would have taken the can, opened it, handed it back to our daughter and continued working, as any sane person would.
With me, asking for help is usually a little more complicated, as my daughter knows by now.
When she handed me the can, I noticed that it had already been partially opened. From that I induced that she had made an attempt to open the can herself, but was either unable to completely remove the lid, or was concerned that she wasn't doing it right.
My next thought was the fact that I was surrounded by computer equipment. If I were to open the can right there at my desk, and it did not go as I'd hoped, I would risk getting tomato juice all over the electronics.
Building on that, I took the can and led my daughter back to the kitchen in order to show her how to open the can over the sink. During my walk there I thought about why my daughter feelt the need to aquire my assistance, and what the purpose of her tomato soup assignment was.
Later that day, after she explained that cooking the tomato soup had taken her three hours, leaving her unable to finish homework in time, I told her that allthough the purpose of the assignment probably was to learn general cooking skills, she also might find it useful to know that tomato soup can be prepared from a bag in 5 minutes in case she enjoyed the taste, but not the work.
In some respects, putting that much thought into a question about can opening seems crazy. And to some extent it might be. But the point that I'm trying to make is not.
Whenever someone hands me an assignment or asks me for assistance, my default operating mode is to ask myself three questions:
I belive there are several reasons why I've come to automate this critical way of thinking over the years.
For the past 20 years I've been a leader. First in my own company, and later as a parent. During those years I've spent a lot of time thinking about what the role of leadership involves. And without going into too much detail, I would argue that one of the primary responsibilties of a leader is to multiply effect for the organization.
In a company, that means that I should spend as little time as possible working in the business completing tasks and as much time as possible working on the business designing how work should be done.
In context of the tomato can example, it means that my job is not to open a can of tomatoes, but rather to enable everyone in the family to be able to open cans of tomatoes.
Or better yet, to enable everyone to cook.
Or better yet, to make sure that everyone knows how to provide their friends and family with delicous and nutritious meals.
I've been running my own company since my 18th birthday. That means that I've always been in a position to design how the organization I'm working in should operate. And as I've grown more experienced, I've been careful to design a workday where everyone (myself included) have the time to engage in focused work, affording us the opportunity to properly understand and produce the best possible outcome to the problems we are responsible for.
My belief is that a clear understanding of ones responsibilities and the time to think deeply about those responsibilities are the most important factors I, both as a leader and a parent, can teach and provide to my coworkers and children.
In the chapters to come I'll lay out how I've come to belive this, and how I go about designing such an environment for myself and those around me.
The great/healthy organization/team needs to
Se also Insight management.
In this context, great is meant to mean:
Check out the survey How healthy is our organization?
See also https://we-are.wecomplish.no:/policy/186.
Great organzation = Healthy teams + team members with high organizational clarity
* Health = Makes the org resilient and attractive
* Clarity = makes the people focused and effective
* Capability = makes the organization skilled and useful
Check out dysfunctional organizations skillset.
Not, Inspirational, motivational fluff/bullshit, i.e.:
https://youtu.be/JDbqsgMwxR8
Traits of a great/healthy/modern leader
A great leader spends their time
their team members in order to get the best out of them.
The differences in being healthy and performant
Parallels to top athletes.
In order to maintain a healthy organization you need
If you want to utilize something effectively to produce maximum output, you need an intimate undestanding of how it works. That's true for people, tools and organizations alike.
Tools usually come with user manuals. People less frequently so. Organizations sometimes come with an handbook maintained by a few people in management or personell which quickly grows outdated as the organization organically evolves and adapts.
No one person knows how the organization works. It's not something that any one person has a complete overview over or can hold in their head (even though some might think they have and can).
Secure by default
Draft
In my experience pain is the primary factor in how people intuitively prioritize. By that I mean what people usually spend their time on is what they find or expect to be the most painful if not adressed.
A persons expectation of pain can come from past experience, or from newly aquired insight and belief into what could turn problematic in the not too distant future.
Depending on how prone someone is towards execution vs planning, some people almost instantly start _doing_ the second they realize what their top priority should be. That can prove problematic in the context of cooperation.
People who just start doing risk don't taking the following into account:
Examples
Identify a task or a project (vs sending an email).
The amount context people provide automatically vary greatly depending on their experience with and intuitition for sharing context.
Draft
I have always been horrified at the meeting culture (or rather lack thereof) in some organizations.
In many organizations that I have collaborated with, it's not uncommon for a workday to consist of back-to-back meetings with 5 to 10 people (or more).
Problems with meetings:
Objectives of meetings:
The case for insight sharing
People aren't always accessible, nor do we expect them to be.
People have meetings, work different hours, get sick, go on holidays, sleep, have a life outside of work and, one day, leave our organization altogether.
Therefore, the questions of how work should be done, how it was done and what can be improved should be accessible without having to consult a person.
A modern organization has less hiararchy, more trust and more distributed and continously evolving responsibilities.
The modern society is more subject to expectations of personal availability that the modern organization to some extent needs to counterbalance in ordet to protect its people.
In a modern organization, more people need to be able to be able to identify and feel empowered to fix bugs in how the organization operates.