Compression! Fix a major source of pain in your organisation

Want to watch this on video rather than read?  Just click here.  5 mins, with captions.

Today’s article goes through one of the most common causes of organisational pain.  A sore back is guaranteed to make people grumpy, and compression is a great way to give your organisation some proper spinal issues.

Now, a big proviso.  Organisational hierarchies are very out of fashion right now.  Here’s three things though:

1. You’re in one, changing them is hard, and you might as well make the obvious changes to make the thing work properly
2. There are many, many situations where a well-run managerial hierarchy is very much the most appropriate organisational design
3. Hierarchies get a bad rap because of the exact sort of issue I am going to go through in this article.  Fix these, and….hierarchies might just work fine!

OK, let’s get on with it.

A Simple Change for the Buy-In, Accountability and Agility You Want

Prefer to watch the video?  Just click here.  4 minutes, with captions.

Your people want more communication.  I know this because your latest staff survey had this as the second-biggest issue behind cross-functional work.

You want more buy-in and commitment.  You also want more accountability or ownership taken, and you want your team, your division, your organisation to be more adaptable, responsible, or dare I say it….that ‘a’ word.

The good news is there’s a simple step you can put in place that lays the foundation for this (not the panacea…but the foundation)

Be networked they cry!

If you’ve been alive and in organisations this century, you’re tired of being told that you need to go from this:

Will It Make The Car Go Faster? A Crucial Work Design Principle From Formula 1

Click here to watch this as a 5-minute video instead.
(It’s got captions)

There’s a lesson in the industry of Formula 1, by which I mean Grand Prix racing, either the most boring thing you’ve ever watched, or an amazing mix of technical skill, driver skill, and one huge political social gossip fest!

The Goal is Clear

There’s one goal in Formula 1 – to win the world championship.  Call that the vision.  From there, the breakdown is clear:

To win the world championship, you need to win more races.  You get the latest version of this after every race, it’s like your monthly report going to your governing body.  Looks like this:

Work Models You Need to Know Ep. 1 – The Four Managerial Roles of Ichak Adizes

Want to watch the video of this? Just click here!

Today’s article is the first in a new series called “Work Models You Need To Know”.  In this series I describe and summarise in each instalment one of the models that I find useful to help my clients understand certain issues that are in their organisation, and what to do about it.

This time, it’s the Four Managerial Roles, and it’s from Dr. Ichak Adizes, an organisational consulting legend who has been in the game for decades.

Dr. Ichak Adizes

Adizes is best known for the Corporate Lifecycle, a fantastic model on how enterprises come into existence, how they grow toward what he calls ‘Prime’, and then how they can decay and sometimes even die.  It looks like this:

How To Know Which Services To Keep Doing After COVID

(Click here to watch me go through this on video).

(You can catch up on previous videos here)

The COVID experience let us try some new things. We had to adjust the way we serve the people that we serve, and now we’re doing some sort of returning back to a new normal.  In this article we’re going to talk about how you figure out what to keep doing, start doing and stop doing after the COVID situation.

First, there are foundations that we need to have in place.

How to make your organisation more adaptable WITH your hierarchy.

(Would you prefer to watch me explain this on video?  Just click here!)

This time we’re going into “fluid, flexible, task-based structures”.  Very fancy sounding words.

First, a quote.  This is from a KPMG report on the things that will change from COVID that was titled with great importance: “Our New Reality: Predictions after COVID-19”.

Remote work will break traditional management structures

As we shift from managing inputs to managing by outcomes, current organisational hierarchies won’t make sense. A shift to flatter and more fluid task-based structures will follow and require new management skills and changes to performance measurement and reward programs. Company culture will also need to be re-examined.

Hierarchies “won’t make sense”.  Come on!

How to beat the New System Blues

(If you’d prefer to watch this on video rather than read, just click here)

You put it in a new system, you’ve got it through the initial getting it up and running. It’s still not quite causing the joy that you thought it would cause, particularly for the people who are using it. What you and your people have got is a case of the New System Blues.

Here’s what to do about this.

ACKNOWLEDGE IT

The first thing we do is… acknowledge it. This means say out loud that the new system, in many circumstances does not work as well for the people who are using it as the old system did.  Why?  Because it’s true!  If people are experiencing something, then that is their experience!  You can’t win that battle.

3 Common Sense Org Design Principles to Bring Back from COVID Working

(If you’d like to check this out on video rather than read it – click here)

COVID working has seen some easily forgotten org design fundamentals come right to the surface. Here they are – don’t let heading back into the physical workplace see you lose the benefits of common sense ways of organising work.

Focus Until Done

The first one is focus until done.  We’ve seen this with remote working.  Before Covid, if your organisation is normal, you’ve had some sort of ‘flexible working’ thing happening for the last two years.  And it’s consisted mainly of reports and a small group with laptops somewhere, not much else.  This is not a competence issue.

What’s happened now?  Look at all the IT teams that were able to get most of their indoor workforce remote within a day or two!  They didn’t suddenly get 10 times more productive.  Instead, the organisation actually let them focus on this one thing until it was done before they went onto the next thing.

An extra month of capacity for free: Three Cs – Capacity

(Click here to watch on video rather than read!)

In the first two articles in this series, I went through the first two of the Three Cs that need to be in place so you can get out of the detail and start doing your real job. The three Cs are:

• Clarity
• Capability
• Capacity

(Click the links above to go the articles or click here to watch them all on video).

This article is about Capacity, which answers “How can I create more time for myself and my people which means I can do the important work that I’m actually paid for”.

Create the Capability in your team so the work gets done…without you!

(If you would prefer to watch me go through this on video rather than read, click here)

In my previous article, I introduced the Three Cs so your people can do their jobs, which allows you to do your job.  They are:

• Clarity
• Capability
• Capacity

The previous article was on Clarity, this one’s about Capability – what each individual needs to bring to the party so they can do the work.  

There’s no genius to the idea that for someone to be able to do their job (so you don’t have to do their job), they need the capability to actually do their job.   What we need is a way to understand what this means.   This is useful in hiring when you’re bringing people into a role, but also more commonly when you’re thinking about why isn’t the job happening the way you thought it would happen.

THE CAPABILITY PYRAMID

The pyramid shows five aspects that make up a person’s capability to do the job.  And like all pyramids, the foundation is at the bottom.  However, we’ll start from the top, and we’ll use the analogy of a professional cyclist to help understand.