All Posts

A few weeks ago, on 2 separate occasions, I wrote about how the vertical structure affects individual employee performance and how jams and gaps impact people personally. For example, when you find yourself in a jam-up, you may feel as though your manager is interfering with your work or competing with you, acting more like a colleague or competitor sharing the workload. It’s not uncommon to see up to three layers in a single reporting chain, and sometimes more, all competing

Early in my career, I had a discussion with an executive who offered advice on titles. He said, “The best tool a manager has is to give an employee a bigger title. It doesn’t cost me anything because I don’t have to give a pay increase, and it keeps the employee feeling valued and motivated.” This was my first exposure to title inflation and how titles can mislead. What he got right was that it didn’t cost him anything… at first. Ideally titles provide information to people w

A few weeks ago, I wrote that the key to maximizing employees’ contributions is to match their capabilities and talents to their work. This is accomplished by hiring people into roles that match their capabilities and by ensuring their direct managers provide value-added support so they can excel in their roles. A frequent reality is that a manager is either overly involved in an employee’s work (see the jam-ups blog) or that the work they perform is too “far away” from the e

Trust creates the conditions for teamwork and superior performance We seem to be caught in an epidemic of lost trust across society, from general distrust of our government institutions and political leaders to a loss of trust and confidence in our large corporations. The misalignment between strong profits, layoffs, and high executive compensation, and the threat AI poses to the future of work, and the mandatory return to the office suggests that the psychological contract o

When A! meets management who is accountable? I saw an interesting posting recently. It pictured a page from a 1979 IBM employee training manual, “a computer can never be held accountable; therefore, a computer must never make a management decision.” Whether that image is genuine or a recently created facsimile of a training manual the message remains relevant. While I believe this view has been universally accepted the issue of accountability for work outputs and decision ma

Undertaking a reorganization comes with a degree of risk. Once you have decided it is time to reorganize there are several steps you can take as leader to improve the likelihood of a successful outcome. Know what you want to accomplish For the organization Be clear on what you want to achieve for you and your organization. For many leaders there is a frustration with the organization’s ability to execute the business plan and operate at a level that will propel the organiz

Whether you are setting out to qualify for the Boston Marathon or reorganize your business, a reliable process enables you to achieve reliable results (performance). Last week’s Boston Marathon had me reflecting on the similarity between preparing for the big race and reorganizing a business. On the surface, this may seem like a stretch but bear with me here. I have been a runner for most of my life, logging over 115,000 km and running dozens of races over the years. I have b

Organization and structure have often been criticized over the years. Words like bureaucracy, inefficiency, and waste are commonly used, and dealing with organization structure is often viewed as a necessary evil that must be tackled before focusing on the core work of the business. The reality, however, can be quite different. The organization structure forms the foundation of work systems in any business. It provides the basis for assigning roles and acts as a mechanism for

When we think of organizational structure we often think of the org chart—boxes containing title and names joined by straight lines. Organization Structure isn’t an org chart, it is so much more. Organization structure is the backbone of work systems in any business. It is the basis upon which work is distributed into roles, and a mechanism for distributing accountability and authority to get work done. Accountability and authority for work are delegated from the most senior