How your 'fractured' organisation is hurting your performance

Having heard someone mention 'the gap' between field and office operations recently, I decided to capture some thoughts around this in this month's drop.

This is a subject that isn’t new, it's recognised that it’s a problem by leaders, yet it's rarely leveraged to the extent it could be, for the benefit of the organisation.

In fact, based on the work I've personally been involved in with multiple organisations across the years I would say that this has always been an opportunity and that it would be in the top 3 problems to solve that would generate the biggest benefit.

Field and Office are interchangeable words

It’s worth pointing this out as different organisations will have different set ups. To simplify this a little though, we are typically describing 2 groups of roles….

1. People that work from a head office location OR work from home with a connection to the head office

2. People who don’t work from the head office, either in another location OR work from home but not connected to the head office

I find this to be the most common distinction in medium/large organisations. A basic view but the reality is that these 2 groups are the focus when we are assessing the size of the gap.

Why does it matter?

The simple fact is that we are trying to drive performance in one organisation, however, it's fractured and so it’s difficult to move it towards it's potential. Typical, divides exist around things like….

Vision - different ideas and beliefs on where things are heading

Purpose - beliefs around different reasons for why we are here

Values - what these are, as how to present in different contexts gets confusing

Behaviours - different environments drive inconsistent core behaviours

Strategy - the current strategic direction for the business gets lost as we focus goals in silo and different directions

Not an exhaustive list, though everything on that list, you could argue, is the responsibility of leadership. It's difficult to put a number on the impact of having a fractured organisation in relation to these particular elements, but I can only imagine that it would be significant.

If people feel like their job is made more difficult by other departments, people with different goals to them, they will ultimately become less engaged. Whether you like it or not, engagement is a fuel for business performance, especially around productivity and Customer.

Customers don’t typically come looking for a department in our organisations. They recognise the organisation, not the function and so if they aren’t then dealt with in a joined up, cohesive way, it can cause issues with customer performance, which we know has a significant effort on our bottom line business performance.

How can we understand the gap?

To start with it’s worth acknowledging that there is one. Would you be happy to say that out loud?

If you have the set up I described earlier then there WILL be a gap. There always will due to the geography, backgrounds, hierarchy organisation structure etc. That's ok, as long as it's not hurting you. So the question, really, 'is the gap big enough that we need to do something different?'. To help think around this, here’s a few questions:

• If you ask people in either function to describe Vision, Purpose, Values, behaviours, strategy, how far apart do they seem?
• How do people in head office based functions describe people in more field based operations, what beliefs do they have?
• How do people in field based operations describe those in head office based functions, what beliefs do they have?
• How do all feel about senior leadership? Is there a difference between how the 2 experience leadership?
• When doing change or improvement work, how do functions work together, at all levels for the benefit of cross functional change?

These aren’t typical questions that I've seen leaders go after, but I believe they throw up a level of insight that's valuable, if we are trying to think about collective performance and not just our own function.

What causes and maintains the gap?

It’s always worth giving some thought to how we get here and what stops us from simply 'sorting it out'. The simplest way of looking at this would be through the lense of organisation structure. Ever since Adam Smith taught us to split out work for productivity during the 1700's, we have been obsessed with putting similar things together for this very reason.

This belief around how to structure organisations is so engrained that you can typically predict how most organisations will be structured, just by looking at LinkedIn for 5 minutes. This combining of similar resources so we can manage and control them better for performance, is fundamental to creation of the gap.

I realise we are probably not about to reinvent our organisation structures to come away from Adam's thinking anytime soon (although some newer organisations have done this), but we can disrupt it by sticking less to the hard drawn lines and reimagining where we may need to pay attention beyond just our part of the model.

It can help to break this down to things we can focus on, and so here are some offshoots to this, which could be seen as secondary causes of any gap.

Disparity - in standards of almost anything. For example, the facilities available for those in head office vs what people in the field may have access to can make people feel less valued and create a 'class' view within the organisation.

Communication methods - just communicating within function maintains the view that people are in a separate part of the world. This manifests into a communication style in leaders that promotes the gap through signals that can be very subtle e.g. in language using terms such as 'they' and 'them'

Assumptions - when you speak to people in a siloed part of an organisation about another function, they will tell you a host of things that they believe about it and the people that work there. The same goes for beliefs in leadership and what they are doing. This doesn’t make it factual. In reality, most of these beliefs are assumed. Some matter and some are extremely damaging and long held.

Measures - Each function will have their own measures. In my experience, these can seem useful on the surface as they allow the leaders in that area to drive performance in that direction, but when considered at an organisation level they are creating sub-optimal conditions for another team. If this is known by team members, they will grow resentment.

Trust - All of the above will erode the idea of having a decent level of trust within teams and across the organisation. Without it, there will be little opportunity for genuine collaboration and as such improvement will remain within function. As Russ Ackoff used to say, you can have all the best car parts but if you put them together you don’t get a working car, or some words to that effect.

Remember Homers car…

How can we start to bridge the gap?

Doing something about this isn’t easy, and I do see efforts to get at this by doing things like letting people spend a day in a different part of the organisation or running cross functional projects. I think there are more things to consider here though, here are some that may help….

• How are middle managers communicating? - This group of people are critical to maintaining or disrupting around this challenge. If they have worked up through the organisation they may carry and portray beliefs around other functions that need to be worked on.
• Make improvement work cross functional - bringing people together to improve across rather than down into own team without a wider view can really start to get at some of those secondary causes highlighted earlier. A watch out though….be prepared to support action to make change once people find opportunities that may challenge typical reporting lines etc.
• Create cross functional hubs that challenge how performance is measured - if you can arrive at measures that look more across than down and promote people having to work together more this can only be a good thing. Don’t just make this exclusive for management, learn how to open this dialogue up to everyone, so it can be felt.
• Talk to people about this - seems obvious but I can't remember the last time I observed an open and honest discussion around this. I've played back thousands of assumptions I've found in teams that are really damaging and it still amazes me the lack of inward reflection that comes with this. Often it’s a defensive response, its discounted, when looking at self and how we've got here would be a great place to start.

I'll stop there or we'll never finish.

One final thought....

If you’re not doing these things, what's stopping you? Beliefs, time, desire?

Enjoy your September

Jason

I mentioned Russell Ackoff before. Some people will be familiar with him, some not. His work around systems thinking is helpful, in my opinion largely due to its accessibility. He helps to generate thinking. In this particular case, using a car as the metaphor.

Here's the link...

Click for 'Systems Thinking with Dr Russell Ackoff' video

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