Maniacal Focus on Organizational Effectiveness
Over the years, CEOs and management gurus have tried every conceivable idea to make their organizations effective, competitive and sustainable. Considering the volume of theories, practices, surveys, and writings during the past decades, it seems there’s been a maniacal focus on making organizations truly effective.
Participation
If you’re a student of organizational effectiveness and development, you’ll never miss the key themes pervading the field. Let memention a few dominant themes.
One such theme is participative management. William Ouchi’s Theory Z has led to the institutionalization of quality circles (QCs). His theory is built on the belief that “involved workers are essential to increased productivity, and the quality circle is the vehicle for this involvement.” The QC members discuss organizational issues in their area, suggest solutions to management, and implement these solutions thru completion.
I like the idea of participative management or workers’ participation. It helps “de-bureaucratize” the workplace. Suddenly, workers have a face, are treated as persons and not as the usual “cogs in the wheel.”
Planned change
Change and innovation are key themes for organizational effectiveness. Some authors have written about innovation as a “phased changed occurring over time.”
Since the onset of the first Industrial Revolution, productivity has been an almost elusive dream. Business leaders had to experiment on standardization, specialization, moving production lines, etc. in search of organizational ef- fectiveness. One of the unintended consequences of these strategies was “segmentalism.”
In the words of Rosabeth Moss Kanter, “segmentalism is a tendency to wall off and compartmentalize actions, events, and problems, thus keeping each piece isolated from the others.” This could lead to overspecialization, limited interaction among segments, and the inability to see the big picture.
Kanter wrote, “… a requirement for empowering people to reach for a future different from the past is respect for the individuals … For people to trust one another in areas of uncertainty where outcomes are not yet known, they need to respect the competence of others. In segmentalist companies, the system is trusted more than the individual. Indeed the system is often designed to protect against individual actions.”
Organizational transition
Whenever planned change occurs, you’re bound to see changes in products, processes, people – or strategies, shared values, structure, systems, and other S’s.
William Bridges wrote Transition: Making Sense of Life Changes. He says that transition is a three-part psychological process: letting go, going through a “neutral zone”, and making a new beginning.
Based on my 43-year experience in human resources, whenever an organizational transition is taking place, the more important focus is not on how the organization is reshaping, but on what happens to people during the transition. If change agents want to succeed in organizational transitions, they should first consider the psychological and sociological effects of change initiatives on the lives of people.
Transformation
John D. Adams wrote in Transforming Work (1998) about the new context in which organizations must operate: billions of people experiencing malnutrition, a drastic shortage of clean water, more than a million species extinct, sufficient damage to the atmosphere that causes polar melts and radical climate changes, 50% reduction in the forests of Asia, Africa and Latin America, and more than 40 nations with nuclear weapons.
Adams emphatically said, “The organizations of the world, whether or not they are direct contributors to the problems such as these, will have to be part of the solution. The predominant mode of operating, focusing primarily on profit and return on investment, will have to give way to a more global purpose if we are to survive.”
In the past, in transforming organizations you asked, “How can an organization become more effective and competitive?” Today, the question to ask is “How can the world be better as a result of the responsibility we take as we do business in it and with it?”
Paradigm shift is an overused term, but I will use it just the same to refer to a change in our own perceptions. In 1970, Thomas Kuhn proposed, “Science advances both through normal science and through paradigmatic science.” Normal science to Kuhn is evolutionary and working within accepted rules. Paradigmatic science is the “eruption of something that challenges and subsequently changes the rules.”
The time is ripe for new paradigms about organizational effectiveness. Life was simpler during the time of Henry Ford when he was churning out Model T cars in his factories. But then, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and other gods and demigods of technological advances changed the workplace and the world of work. The newworkplace calls for new paradigms and new worldviews.
In today’s workplace, problems are holographic – in people and in systems, where equilibrium is hard to find. We can no longer assume that the workplace is static, as it changes faster than we can adapt. However, some leaders continue to operate with an illusion of control.
Anne Wilson Schaef, author of Women’s Reality, wrote, “Individuals function the same way as the organizations they inhabit. Organizations function the same way as the system they inhabit, and the system is made up of the individuals in the organization.”
If you want an effective organization, start by respecting the individuals that make up the organization, creating shared values and shared goals, empowering and trusting them to create value for the organization’s customers, and equitably sharing with them the fruits of their labor. (Email: erniececilia@gmail.com)