Science fiction followers may remember a robot in one of the Star Trek episodes, when confronted by irrational human behavior, saying, “That does not compute.”
If you’re a business leader or a decision-maker, do you see things as “not computing” within your organization? Are you detecting tell-tale signs of lackluster performance? Do you think that your company should be more competitive than it is right now? How about your people? Are they as flexible and as engaged as they should be in order to be innovative and solutions-oriented? Or worse, do you see a financial crisis looming on the horizon?
The question is: Why? No leader wants to lead a ‘dead organization walking.’
The overall goal of an organizational diagnosis is to find out and apply what should be happening within the organization versus what is happening. Your objective is to improve business performance overall.
As discussed in a previous HRTools.com Insight, leaders first must recognize that internal deficiencies exist. Next, leaders must commit to finding out what problems are causing those deficiencies and how they’re interfering with achieving optimal success.
Granted, this kind of overall scrutiny isn’t something that organizations conduct on a regular basis. So here are a couple suggestions of what to watch out for—or some common misconceptions about this process. Some business leaders may tend to sabotage the process by:
- Being short-sighted by an immediate crisis: They may act on symptoms and immediate or localized issues experienced by a team—such as those between a manager and an employee. In doing so, they are not getting to the root of the problem. And to get at the root of the problem, you have to ask tough questions. You have to also acknowledge reality, which means you must involve employees in the process. This point takes us to another common mistake.
- Neglecting to recognize the value of involving all stakeholders. When organizations fail to involve the employees to some degree, they are less likely to gain their long-term commitments. Employees, after all, are the ones who can help you improve your processes and help you recognize what is going on within your company. If you don’t involve employees, you may get some short-term compliance, but that is not the same as gaining their long-term commitment. When stakeholders become involved, you will find that they, in turn, can help you recognize the issues your organization is experiencing and help you come up with the solutions to those issues.
In short: In order to achieve success, and before implementing an organizational diagnosis effort, business leaders should prepare to go at it with more than just a ‘live in the moment’ kind of attitude. In addition to analyzing your income and balance sheets, for instance, you must address all the areas that make the funds go in and out. And you simply cannot have one leader making unilateral decisions. Instead, remember that all decisions also have decision points, which can have wide and long-reaching consequences for the entire organization.
The idea is that you examine not just isolated issues or departments or tasks, but also how changes you make to any one of them have implications for other parts of the system. So you don’t treat one issue at a time when those issues are connected to other parts of how your business runs. Otherwise, you take the risk of unintended consequences.
In my next Insight, I will review steps that an organization can take to effectively conduct an organizational diagnosis.