Why your organogram won’t save you

We do like organograms, don’t we? Clearly and rationally, they chart the roles and responsibilities of everyone at the top, from the chairman of the board down to the heads of departments. They look great, and give the impression of order and purpose.

The problem is, they are just notional, and don’t accurately represent reality. Beneath the organogram is the actual human condition, which is complex and messy. This underlying reality is governed by relationships, which together make up a tangled web that an organogram can’t capture.

In this realm, human emotions, quirks and frailties still rule. Cliques form. Priorities diverge. Rivalries, personal ambitions and inadequate communication can knock projects or other corporate goals off course.

It’s not all negative, though. Equally at play are human impulses like the quest for excellence, grit, commitment and loyalty.

Too few leadership teams in charge of projects and companies recognise the importance – I would even say the primacy – of human relationships in the quest for results. Too many put their faith in the logical abstraction of an organogram, whether it lays out the organisation of a company or the organisation of a major project.

As an engineer, I can tell you that engineers are fatally prone to this. We tend to think that if our calculations and designs – a result of our trained rational capacity – will work in the material realm, they’ll work in the human realm, too, and that if they don’t, there is just something “wrong” with people.

This is really risky. Take a major project, where multiple disciplines from multiple organisations, all with different and perhaps conflicting priorities, must come together to produce a difficult, risky and expensive result. Rarely is any thought whatsoever given to the relationships. I know this both from my own experience as a project manager, and from being being called in, as a coach, to help teams get their at-risk projects back on track.

Our instinct is to enforce the organogram: express anger, threaten to fire, threaten to sue. Back in the day, I found “Dave Stitt is a bastard!” scrawled on the wall of the portable toilet. I hate to say it, but it made me feel proud, because I’d been conditioned to think you had to be tough and intimidating to get things done.

Sometimes that can work, but it is not a sustainable foundation for repeated success in achieving big results. A claim is not success. Talent leaving is not success.

My message here is that relationships, not organograms (however well-thought-out), are the true foundation of results.

Briefly, it works as follows. Let’s say your major project or company initiative has hit a barrier. Something is going wrong, and you need to take action. But the problem is complex, because people and living systems are involved. This is often described as “politics”. You can maybe sense what needs to happen, but because people and systems are involved, your control over the relevant mechanism or mechanisms is limited.

What you need is for key people to see the problem as you see it, to sense what you sense, and to choose to help you by harnessing their minds, their will, and their spheres of influence to the goal of fixing the problem.

If the relationships in the team are strong, they open up a greater number of possibilities for action, and this creates real, concrete opportunities to take action, all of which is necessary to prepare the ground for action.

If the relationships in the team are weak, concrete opportunities to take effective action stubbornly refuse to materialise.

Note: this is emphatically not about being “nice” to everybody. There are straightforward techniques for team goal-scoping, goal-setting and reporting that build trust, accountability and buy-in across the team. Trust, accountability and buy-in are the nuts and bolts of strong relationships.

These techniques acknowledge people as people, not just as boxes in an organogram. They acknowledge the foibles whilst limiting their impact, giving the positive impulses room to grow.

By all means, do an organogram, because it’s useful to map out what the roles and responsibilities should be. But don’t fall into the trap of thinking that everything will go smoothly just because you have one.

We help teams delivering critical projects establish a solid basis for success, whether at inception or after. Our popular one-day session introduces the principles described above. Check out Discovery Day