Achieve Alignment

The higher you climb in an organization, the more you take on the role of organizational architect, creating and aligning the key elements of the organizational layer.

To change the culture, you need to change the architecture as well as reinforce what you're trying to do with the right leadership.

Avoiding Common Traps

• Making changes for change's sake
• Not adjusting for the STARS situation
• Trying to restructure your way out of deeper problems - resist doing any restructuring until you understand the root cause of the problems
• Creating structures that are too complex - strive, where possible, for clear lines of accountability. Simplify the structure to the greatest degree possible without compromising core goals.
• Overestimating your organization's capacity to absorb change

Designing Organizational Architecture

Strategic Direction: make sure the mission, vision, and strategy are well thought through and logically integrated

Structure: Look at whether your group's existing structure, processes, and skill bases support the strategic direction

Core Processes

Skill Bases

Decide how and when to introduce a new strategic direction

Think through the correct sequencing

TOWS / SWOT

The correct approach is to start with the environment and then analyze the organization.

The first step is to assess the organization's external environment, looking for emerging threats and potential opportunities.

Having identified potential threats and opportunities, the group should next evaluate them with reference to organizational capabilities. Does the organization have weaknesses that make it particularly vulnerable to specific threats?

Does the organization have strengths that would permit it to pursue specific opportunities.

Diagnosing Misalignments

Your goal during your first 90 days should be to identify potential misalignments and design a plan for correcting them.

• Misalignments between strategic direction and skill bases
• Misalignments between strategic direction and core processes
• Misalignments between structure and processes
• Misalignments between structure and skills

Assess Strategy Implementation

• Is our overall pattern of decisions consistent with our defined direction?
• Are we using the specified performance metrics to make day-to-day decisions?
• Are people acting as teams and collaborating across functions?
• If implementation requires the development of new employee skills, is a learning-and-development infrastructure in place to develop those skills?

Assess Structure

• Does the grouping of team members help us achieve our mission and implement the strategy? Are the right people in the right places to work toward our core objectives?
• Do reporting relationships help align effort? Is it clear who is accountable for what? Is the work of different units integrated effectively?
• Is the allocation of decision rights helping us make the best decisions to support the strategy? Is the right balance achieved between centralization and decentralization? Between standardization and customization?
• Are we measuring and rewarding the kinds of achievements that matter most to our strategic aims? Is the balance right between fixed rewards and performance based rewards? Between individual incentives and group incentives?

Analyze Processes

Your first challenge is to identify those processes and then to decide which of them are most important to your strategy.

To evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of each core process you should examine four aspects:

• Productivity
• Timeliness
• Reliability
• Quality