Written by: Betsy Kauffman, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
A (re)designed company is an entity that prioritizes introspection — taking time to intentionally work on the organization to make change happen. It's about creating an organization where people wake up each day motivated to come to work and end their days feeling fulfilled and valued. It’s about alignment and involvement at all levels — communication, collaboration, and feeling safe to speak up. It’s about understanding how our work contributes to the bigger picture and want to go the extra mile to build the right products and services to meet our customers' needs. A [re]designed organization is more concerned about culture than just the bottom line because they know which one of those is easier to fix.
If you’re not sure what that means, let me explain. Oftentimes, companies can experience a plateau or get stuck in a rut. There’s the “this is what we’ve always done it” problem or the “my way or the highway” type approach. Neither of those things is productive, and they won’t help accomplish the organizational goals and mission.
At Cross Impact Coaching, we are an organizational design firm focused on creating innovative, aligned, disruptive agile organizations. Our goal is to help leaders and their teams create high-performing organizations through what we like to call an organizational [re]design.
Our approach is to implement quick, iterative experiments with our clients, allowing us to get feedback quickly. This allows us to pivot and evolve to ensure the changes we make are impactful and lasting. We focus on building the right products and services for your customers. We like to engage clients using a design-thinking approach, laid out in four steps.
Empathize: By conducting a brief series of interviews with key individuals in the company, we get a basic understanding of the landscape, the main players, and the impacted parties that decisions affect.
Strategize: We run collaborative workshops to ensure we understand the problems we are trying to solve and co-create a plan using a lean change framework. The lean change framework takes into account strategy, structure, process, people, and culture to ensure we have a clear understanding of the outcomes we want to achieve, measurements of success, and people impacted.
Experiment: We run a 45-60 day experiment based on the plan where we observe, listen, coach, consult, and learn.
Retrospect: Once the experiment is complete, we take time to reflect and determine what worked and what didn't, as well as what we backlog or discard and what we keep.
This process may seem daunting or overwhelming for some, but the results of this process are worth their weight in gold.
The difficult part is making the conscientious decision to take time working ON the company and not just working IN it. What do I mean by this? It’s easy just to get inundated with the daily tasks and not leave sufficient time to dissect what’s working and what’s not at an organizational level. In last month’s Brainz article, I explored in-depth the steps to take to ensure you are taking time to work on your company. If you haven’t read that yet, it is a great complementary piece to this article.
A redesigned organization is a breath of fresh air — it attacks the pain points and tackles the “hard stuff” to get to the root of the problem and solve it. If we ignore these issues or impediments, it can begin to deteriorate the mission and vision of the company, causing organizations to lose customers and excellent employees.
A truly redesigned organization thrives due to transparency, goal setting, role clarity, and a positive environment. This produces happy, efficient, and fulfilled employees. Doesn’t that sound like an organization you want to work at?
Betsy Kauffman, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Betsy Kauffman is a globally recognized Leadership and Organizational Agility Coach with more than 20 years of experience working in Fortune 500 companies. Her company, Cross Impact Coaching, helps leaders create innovative, aligned, disruptive organizations. Betsy has observed and worked side by side with hundreds of CxO leaders and has seen just about every variation of how Leadership Teams operate and execute (both successfully and not so successfully). She deeply understands and has experienced firsthand when the team of individuals charged with leading the organization isn't aligned, focused, and working as one, the rest of the organization suffers. She is a published author providing thought leadership to both the agile and project management communities and speaks internationally on topics around leadership, corporate culture, and achieving organizational agility. She is currently in the process of developing her first TED talk in conjunction with the TED@PMI partnership to be released in September 2020.
