Requisite Organization Structure

What Have You Done for Me Lately?
In the blog world, recency is everything!  I’ve been going where the energy is lately and that hasn’t been Mission Minded Management.

Truth is Timeless – Requisite Organization
My blog is rooted in the meta-model, Requisite Organization, which focuses upon structuring your organization to take advantage of natural laws.  It’s the science behind effective organizations.  It informs and enables you to structure your organization, assess and lead your talent with integrity — as an engineer would with a systems, science-based approach.  Yes, I’m a management consultant, but I’m really an organizational engineer.

Executive Leadership – Ensuring Strategy Execution, Accountability Systems Design
Lack of a clear framework, which Requisite Organization provides, leads many an executive puzzled by why s/he can’t get her strategy executed.  When you design your leadership systems without the common inherent conflicts of interest that exist in most leadership systems, buy-in happens naturally.  People want to contribute at work.  Requisite Organization’s Accountability and Authority framework integrates these two ideas into a leadership system of integrity.

Major Short Article Repository – Requisite Organization, Organizational Structure, Managerial Leadership, Talent Assessment
I encourage you to use the search function on my blog to take advantage of the 300 posts in this time before they become a book.

If you have questions or make comments, I’ll still respond.  I just won’t be posting with any regularity.  Thank you for your support over the years.  And, as always…

I’m OK.  You’re OK.  Let’s fix the system.

Systems Drive Behavior
However, in the end, their righting single incidents or donating toward a personal financial burden of an employee simply perpetuates the idea that good intentions with a handful of feel-good outcomes makes everything right.? Systems drive behavior!? If you don’t tend to the dysfunctional systems, the dysfunctional behaviors will continue.

Managers Are Accountable for the Output of Their Employees
In the show, when these CEOs come upon a manager who is failing in his/her managerial leadership duties, the CEO usurps the authority of their accountable manager by taking action directly with the manager.? To add to that, the action takes the form of “be nice now”, and as the camera fades over grateful smiles and joyful tears, everyone appears to live happily ever after.??

Creating an Accountability Leadership Culture
A clear, requisite framework of accountabilities and authorities would do more for these workplaces than all the good intentions and fatherly advice we see.

Managers-Once-Removed Should Be Accountable to Identify Talent
The CEOs often identify promising young talent, and at least once, a Training Future Leaders program is set up, but it begs the question, who is accountable for identifying talent and what is it that we are looking for?? And is it all about training?

A System for Talent Assessment and Management
An understanding of work levels could create a science-based foundation for fair and consistent talent assessment and management system.

Call Me!
So I’m sending a shout out to Larry O’Donnell of Waste Management, Coby Brooks of Hooters, Joe DePinto of 7-Eleven, and Dave Rife of White Castle:?? You’re OK.? Your employees are OK.? Let’s fix the system!? It’s clear you have both a head and a heart.? Let’s put them to use toward designing systems!

Executive Leadership Defined
Creating and tending to the system is executive level work.? Through this, you ensure your operational organization is designed correctly and a leadership system is in place to ensure employees have what they need.? PeopleFit can provide you a framework from which you can make informed and intentional decisions in the areas of organizational structure, talent management and managerial leadership systems.

Three Areas of Influence over Employee Performance

1. The first is the person’s capability profile which is composed of
a) knowledge, skills and experience,
b) values, temperament and inhibitors, as well as
c) current cognitive capacity.

2. The second is the employee’s manager’s capability profile, composed of the aforementioned items.

3. The third is the system!? i.e. Organizational processes, policies, structure or lack thereof.

Measuring Performance Only Tells a Piece of the Story
This is why we must judge employee effectiveness in light of circumstances.? Measuring performance only is patently unfair, as it never tells the whole story.? When you measure performance, you are also measuring the system within which the employee is working.? Designing the system is executive level work.?

Engage the System to Engage the Employees
Don’t forget.? Without fairness, you will not have engagement.? If you want engagement, stop trying fix your employees and take a look at your system.

I’m OK.? You’re OK.? Let’s fix the system.

Executives Should Take a Page from Farmers
Executive leadership?should be concerned about creating the conditions necessary for employees to flourish.? People are wired to work.? They want to produce and produce bountifully.

Farmers don’t spend their days tending to individual plants.? They prepare the soil, monitor water levels, and keep the pests away.? When they do this, the plants do the “work”.

What Causes Poor Engagement? Not Poor Employees
I daresay that lack of engagement stems from lack of collective understanding of executive level work – designing and tending to the system, the environment, within which their employees work.

Looking for?a Leadership Design Blueprint?
Elliott Jaques’ Requisite Organization is a managerial leadership system that creates conditions under which all but the most disturbed employees can be successful.? Employees and managers don’t have to spend their days compensating for poor system design, instead,?they can do what they were naturally designed to do – to work and use their gifts for both the good of the organization and for a personal sense of satisfaction.

I’m OK.? You’re OK.? Let’s fix the system.

What will you spend your days this year doing – creating or coping?

Throwing The Baby Out with the Bathwater – Egalitarianism
We are kidding ourselves to believe?managerial hierarchies can be?egalitarian.? Power must be exercised.? We can “nice up” the word power by calling?it leadership or authority, but?it is power just the same.

So then the question becomes,?if power must be?excised, how can we set up a managerial leadership system to channel power to every one’s advantage??

Designing for Good Power
Elliott Jaques’ Requisite Organization Model outlines just a system.? Here is how it addresses power to create an environment of trust and fairness.? Without trust and fairness, employees disengage.

Operationalizing Good Power

• Granting managers the authority they need to hire their people, refuse unacceptable candidates and remove non-performing employees.
• Pairing the aforementioned authority with managerial accountability for the output of their employees.? No more scapegoating.? Employees are accountable to do their best.??
• Employees are?judged by their EFFECTIVENESS, not solely their output so no employee has to resort to cheating or short sightedness to “make their goals”.
• Offering a science-based means to ensure that employees have managers who are cognitively more capable than themselves.
• Offering a science-based means to ensure that employees are hired and/or promoted into roles that suit their capability.

Starving Bad Power

• Clearly defining accountabilities, authorities and escalations procedures so no employee has to resort to manipulation to get his work done.
• Making sure there are not redundant layers in the organization that bog down work or leadership vacuums (too few layers.)

Making sure that at least two sets of eyes are on each employee by:

• Making managers-once-removed accountable for the fair treatment of their subordinates-once-removed.
• Making managers-once-removed accountable for the career development of subordinate-once-removed.

Disallowing No Power

• Making all managers accountable to exercise managerial leadership, not just to contribute on the technical part of their role.
• Making all employees accountable to give their best advice and speak their minds.??When managers are accountable for the output of their employees,?managers actually want to hear the truth?so they can make changes.? Scapegoating is no longer an option.
• Making all managers accountable to listen to the advice of employees, but pairing this with the ultimate authority to decide.

What kind of power do you experience in your organization?

I’m OK.? You’re OK.? Let’s fix the system.

What Drucker was drawing a line between was the operational work levels in an organization and the strategic work levels in an organization.

Doing Things Right aka Current Operations
The work of requisite work levels 1 through 3 is to make the best use of current resources to most effectively deliver today’s products and services to today’s customers.? Theirs is to decide how to make the best of what has been allocated by the executive levels.? This is where the money is made within organizations.

Doing the Right Things aka Strategic Intent
The work of requisite work levels 4+ is decide how current operations needs to change in order to deliver goals that fall out more than two years.? Theirs is to decide whether the organization is doing the right things to be viable in the future.

No Need for Leadership Snobbery
I’ve said before in one of my most visited posts, that innovation must occur at all levels, although it will look different by level.? Leadership is the same way.? If we use Elliott Jaques’ requisite organization definition of leadership:?The ability to set purpose or direction for others and then get them to move in that direction with competence and full commitment; then all managers must be exercise leadership, for that is their role.?

It’s not just executives who are leaders.? I daresay that?minute-for-minute, first line managers spend more time exercising leadership than executives do.

What do you think?

I’m OK.? You’re OK.? Let’s fix the system.

Photo credit: gmeaders_ch

?

I was reminded last week at the Global Organization Design Society’s International Conference that Ford Motor Company worked with Elliott Jaques and The Levinson Institute in the areas of requisite organization design and talent assessment years back.

Was a work-levels, science-based approach to organization design and talent assessment a contributor to Ford’s sole survivor status amongst the big three?

• Level 5 – The brand, the business model, the strategy
• Level 4 – The infrastructure, the future focus strategic work, operational change decisions
• Level 3 – The operational processes for consistency, best practices for efficiency and waste minimization, contingency planning.

A Single Franchise Unit Can Be Managed at Level Two
Franchising allows someone currently capable of level 2 work to run an effective business by “outsourcing” the higher level work.?

What is Level Two Work?
Level 2 work consists of day to day operations, dealing with customers, scheduling and training staff, and this is the accountability of the franchise owner.

Win-Win
When you consider that Elliott Jaques, the father of the Requisite Organization model, estimated that only 10% of the world’s adult?population has capability at level three or higher, the franchise model allows a large percentage of people to complement their natural gifts in a way that allows them to earn a generous living for themselves and their families.

Da, da, da, da, daaaa.? I’m lovin’ it.

Organizational engineering, talent assessment,?and designing managerial leadership systems rooted in Elliott Jaques’ meta-model, Requisite Organization.

What a marketing nightmare – creating demand for services that most executives have never conceived of!

Let’s Learn from Other Professions!
While most professions and industries have standards of practice which weave a common thread throughout the work done, managerial leadership is lacking the adoption of universal rules of engagement.

• Can you imagine the chaos if your bookkeeper decided to “shake it up” and put debits on the right and credits on the left? Bounce
• Have you ever visited a house where the plumber put hot on the right and cold on the left?? Ouch!

The Plumbers Figured It Out
Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about what the plumbers were facing in 1926 (Does it sound like the state of management today?)

In 1926, a group of Los Angeles plumbing inspectors recognized that there were no uniform requirements for the installation and maintenance of plumbing systems, and at that point in time disease was rampant, a lot of it spread through improper sanitation. Disorder in the industry was the result of widely divergent plumbing practices and the use of many different, often conflicting, plumbing codes by local jurisdictions. It was these plumbing inspectors that understood the necessity of developing a model code that could be uniformly applied across jurisdictions.

So what is Requisite Organization??
Requisite is a meta-model that combines science-based theory regarding levels of work and human capability and the two universal values of trust and fairness and endeavors to:

• Create organizational conditions within which most people can be successful.
• Enable productive work.
• Eliminate the wasted energy used to compensate for three structural flaws – 1. Organizational layering errors 2. Mismatching people to roles ?3. Mismatching people to managers.
• Design explicit “rules of engagement” across functions.
• Create explicit, uniform, and universal minimum accountabilities and authorities for three sets of organizational players – 1. Employees 2. Managers 3. Managers-once-removed.
• Create a science-based methodology for matching people to roles.

Trust and Fairness – Core Values
I believe in Requisite Organization because you can always trace the principles and policies within it back to a desire for trust and fairness – two precursors to employee engagement.?

Human Dignity
The other thing that stands out is respect for human dignity.? Requisite organization purports that nearly all organizational dysfunction can be traced to poor structure and systems, not deficient employees.?? (BTW – I pasted that last sentence from Wikipedia.? A fun fact for you to know is that?I was the one who wrote most of Wikipedia post regarding Requisite Organization.)

Results
Finally, it works!? After over 10 years of working with the model, I am convinced it is valid and reliable, and managers appreciate it.? Sure, it takes courage, discipline and practice to convert an organization to a fully requisite organization, but managers ultimately see that it is worth the effort.

I’m OK.? You’re OK.? Let’s fix the system.

What has your experience been?

Requisite Work Levels
Since work levels is a recurring topic here at Mission Minded Management, I thought it might be helpful to publish another set of “real life” examples of work by level.

Sample Longest Task by Work Level:
Work Level 4:
Design and implement a comprehensive strategic talent management system. (2-5 years)

Work Level 3:
Write and implement the operational plan for the roll out of one element within a strategic talent management system. Build feedback loops, assess, and refine processes into a set of best practices. (1 to 2 years)

Work Level 2:
Manage a 4 – 12 month project to implement one section within a serial “roll out” of a new HR methodology or program.

Work Level 1:
Support HR department by providing products as defined, i.e reports, material production. Or by delivering administrative services as trained, i.e. inventory maintenance, scheduling, shipping. (1 day to 3 months)

What level of work is your role?