Why do we spend so much effort managing people?

There is a societal belief that you have to manage people to get anything done. Most organizations are underperforming or struggling with execution, and with that, the tendency is to over-manage people to try to create better results.

The conventional business model is to focus primarily on managing people to deliver products and services.

The dictionary definition of the word organization is a group of people brought together to deliver on a purpose.

We organize our businesses to manage people, not deliver on a purpose.?

We set goals to improve the math on the balance sheet, not to deliver on a purpose.

Purpose stems from creating value. Value is what people buy, not products and services.?

Conventional business practices waste vast amounts of resources, be they human capital, financial capital, earthly resources, time, and effort to deliver goods and services.?

Why not organize ourselves to deliver value - not manage people? When people are aligned, magic happens.

Think about how well people organize and execute when tragedy strikes. Why? Everyone is aligned on the same purpose. Hurricane, earthquake, tsunami…the purpose is the same…to help people as quickly as possible.??

So we need to organize, yes. What we organize around matters. Should we organize around managing individuals? Not so much.

Organizations run our societies, and it's with all these organizations that we have an opportunity to tap into the brilliance of mankind to deliver effectively and efficiently what we need for our future.?

We can shift our thinking and create a very bright future for us all.

The key to change is to change your belief system; your belief system about how we organize people to deliver on a purpose.

What are you really focused on? Getting your job done? Is everything you do every day adding value? Or are you dealing with politics, bureaucracy, miscommunication, mistakes, meetings without outcomes, and disconnects resulting in customer dissatisfaction, poor business performance and frustration?

What's the reason the organization was created in the first place? To manipulate a math problem so that the balance sheet looks better? To deliver a product or service? Or to provide value to the world?

If you ask your employees Why does working for our organization matter to you? you may receive a myriad of responses. Likely many are there for the paycheck, not because they are motivated by what the company does. How well is everyone aligned in your organization to delivering value - being on purpose?

Which invites the conversation about organizational structure. It is a natural human tendency for us to be hierarchical, yet hierarchies are at the very root of most organizational issues, dampening the ability for human collaboration - and there's studies that prove it.?

Without purpose, people are not motivated, everyone is working at a different cadence, in a different direction (the purpose they make up).

You can imagine the chaos, the waste of effort and resources that ensues because we do not focus on a purpose and make sure that everyone we're hiring is aligned to that purpose.?

Aligning to purpose is becoming more prevalent and those companies are higher performing organizations. The purpose of the organization is clear. Everyone's rowing in the same direction. Amazing gains in collaboration, productivity, innovation are available, and likely they are still struggling with creating a scalable organization, a one that's easy to grow.?

At least they are beginning to tap the brilliance of the workforce.?

So consider that you need to get really clear on your organization's purpose and have everyone aligned to that and if people can't align to that, then they need to move on and you need to bring people that can align to that purpose.?

Traditional organizations are not set up for focusing on purpose. Instead it is about placating who you're reporting to, being managed and controlled in what you're doing. You have little say into what's being given to you as far as work goes.?

This will not tap the brilliance in the workforce.?

Most organizations are still operating with industrial age concepts; that we need to manage and control the workforce. Back in the dawn of the industrial age we had an uneducated workforce. And so our educational systems are still quite outdated, because they teach just enough for people to need to be told what to do.? Most educational systems don't teach us how to be effective contributors in the world. Most organizations are not designed to allow folks to be effective contributors.

Today, we have an educated workforce and we are in the digital age. Why would we stick to these old rules? It's human nature. We create top-down functionally segregated hierarchies out of habit. We think that's the way to manage anything. And you look at any organizational chart - I don't care if it's the government, healthcare, business, it'll all look the same. I have literally taken organizational charts and changed the names of a few of the higher level roles in the organization and the chart went from resembling a manufacturing organization to a healthcare organization.?

We're not tapping the brilliance of the workforce.?

What is common is to compartmentalize people into departments, where everybody has groupthink because they all do the same thing. We're all marketers. We're all assemblers. We're all nurses. We dump all these people together in departments and we expect innovation to happen across the enterprise. We expect magic to happen as each of these individual departments works on their own goals typically set by leadership to manipulate the balance sheet. And here we are all working independently, and we're all rowing differently.?

So structure matters - it drives behavior - and there's a much simpler and effective way to structure your organization.?

Why not?design the business to physically align people and technology to purpose and value delivery?

Align people and hold everyone accountable to delivering value and you cannot help but delight customers, tap the brilliance of the workforce, and streamline the organization. Success for all need not be so hard to achieve.

Welcome to The Future of Working Together

#thelastreorg #thefutureofworkingtogether #employeeengement #success

peopl