S02:E06 Organizational Design + Development

S02-E06: Organizational Design + Development 

This time Jeff explores Organization Design + Development. He teaches concepts of team culture, different ways to organize your team, and the Jethro Principle of organizational development from Exodus 18. No matter the size of your organization or where you fit in the structure of your company, you’ll learn how to impact the group by leading from where you are.

Liberty Leadership Institute Workshop Podcast hosted by Jeffrey Ganthner.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Okay. All right. Hello, and welcome to the Liberty Leadership Institute Podcast, a marketplace ministry of Liberty Life Church. My name is Jeff Gantner, and I serve as the director of this relevant and timely ministry as we look for ways that we can serve God in the marketplace. In this podcast, we will be discussing organizational design and development. As always, please follow us and give us an awesome review on your preferred podcast platform. This helps us to get the word out. Let's open with prayer. Lord, I pray that you will use this podcast for your glory and that we develop a closer walk with you as we strive to thrive and leave a legacy with our businesses, family, church, and communities. Thank you, Lord Jesus. Well, let's begin. Well, if you listen to this podcast several times now, you know that I always begin with the word legacy and talking about leaving a legacy. And the word legacy itself has kind of spells out L-E-G-A-C-Y. And the way I look at the word legacy, I kind of look at it as you got to be able to lead. Are you a leader in your family, in the community, and the next generation? How about engagement? Are you engaged? The E. Are you engaged with all those? How about giving? The G. Do you give generously? Are you accountable to somebody? Do you have an accountability partner? Maybe it's your spouse. Maybe it's your spouse and a good trusted friend. Maybe it's your pastor. Are you competent in something? What are your skill sets? What has God called you to do? And the why is say yes. Would you default to saying yes? Being legacy-minded means that you're going to say yes and default to that, as opposed to saying no. A brief, real brief recap from the last one we talked about. I talked about a little bit about team development. And if you look at um Patrick Lincioni, we talked about the five dysfunctions of a team. This comes straight from him. You've got to be able to build trust, master conflict, achieve commitment, embrace accountability, and get results. Can you do those things? Right? Can you do those things? Or are you stuck on, wow, we we do have a lot of conflict around here. We just don't trust each other. Build that trust first. Trust always, always is the beginning. When you look at teams, think about a canoe. If you're all rowing in the same direction, you can row fast. Those are called people that are actively engaged in the business, people rowing in the same direction. Unfortunately, many businesses are filled with people that are actively engaged, actively disengaged, and just disengaged. Your job as a leader is to reach those disengaged and get them to become actively engaged. And those that are actively disengaged, get them off your canoe. Don't waste another minute with that. So those are some things that we talked about last time and team and team development. This time I want to talk about organizational design and development. We have a guiding verse I have for you. Proverbs 22-29. It says, Do you see someone skilled in their work? They will serve before kings. They will not serve before officials of low rank. Again, Proverbs 2229. Do you see someone skilled in their work? They will serve before kings. They will not serve before officials of low rank. God has created you to do certain things. And be able to do certain things, He's made us a creative mind. And part of that's learning how to design. Yes, I said it, learning how to design. Now some of you might be thinking, I don't have a design bone in my body, or I don't have any style, and that's okay. I want you to look at the word design in two different capacities, as a verb and as a noun. The word as design as a verb is to conceive and plan out in the mind, to devise for a specific function or end, to make a drawing pattern, pattern, or sketch of. Can you see something in your brain? Well, that's designing. You might be designing, you might be not physically designing with your hand and a piece of paper and a pen, but can you see something? Can you look into the future and create something? Design is a noun. Design is a particular as a noun, it's a particular purpose or intention held in view by an individual group. It's a deliberative, purposeful planning. A preliminary sketch or an outline showing the main features of something to be executed. A decorative pattern, the arrangement of details or elements. Are you being intentional with your creativity? That's designing as well. Designing both as a verb and as a noun. The nice thing about design is oftentimes you're limited by something. And that actually can from many people think of that as a as a as a way that you do not um allow for creativity in the workplace or creativity in your business. But if you think about a limitation, it actually it actually is very good. Think about a limitation and change that word limitation to a constraint. If you're constrained in some capacity, maybe you're constrained with budget or a schedule or talent. That's actually a good thing. Use those constraints to your advantage. Because the one thing about design is you can run into design paralysis. We just keep on designing over and over and over again. So you want to have some limitation, some constraint to your design process. Those constraints you can flip to becoming parameters, which become a criteria, which become a design program. Use that, use that to your abilities and use that to your advantage, not as a limitation. Okay? The other thing too when you think about designing, and it's a skill, is you learn to dissect the complex. You take something very, very complex and break it down to smaller elements. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time, right? One bite at a time. Same thing with design or designing something complex. You break the complex down to simple elements. You can break down your business, you can break down your team, your organization into smaller elements, and think about designing that team, setting up that team for success. Building a team culture for success. And speaking of culture, what is that? A team's culture can defined as individuals that share something in common and strive and and strive to achieve it together. Building team culture is a is a process. It takes work to build a good team culture. You want to avoid what's called an organizational crisis. When you don't have a strong team culture of those that can trust and commit to excellence and commit to doing good things, you have what's called an organizational crisis. And that occurs when no team's culture starts when it when a team's culture starts to fracture and no longer do shared values overcome differences be amongst team members. Everyone's different, and that's okay. But can you trust each other still? When the differences start to dominate over similarities, small fractures become large divides. So you gotta be able to learn to trust, be able to be committed, have humility, have a good attitude, and focus on team values to have a strong organizational culture. So ask yourself this. As a leader, what are your team's values and culture? If your team is facing an organizational crisis, how would you as a leader refocus them? What are some things that you can do? Notice that this starts with building trust and ends with a focus on growth, right? You still have to build that trust and focus on that growth. Okay. So after building a team culture, what are some other things that you need to do? You need to look at what kind of a team you have. Are you more of a clan? An acocracy? A market-based team, or a hierarchy? Let me explain those for a second. A clan is kind of a collaborative team. We're all in this together. There's a leader, but we're kind of all surrounding that leader with our skill sets. We're all in this together. It's all about us. It's very internally focused, okay? Very internally focused. But there's a lot of flexibility with it. So it's all about us as a team doing this together. We're going to survive as a team, thrive as a team, and excel as a team, or we're going to fail as a team. Okay? And ad hocracy, it's all about creating a culture of creativity. Okay? Is it all about what we're serving? It's very flexible still, like a clan, but it's all about the external, not the internal. It's all about the client, the project, the opportunity. It's all about the external things. Or are you marketplace focused where it's about the external, but it's a lot about control. In this market, we can only do certain things. We don't have a lot of flexibility, but we're externally focused. That's how we're organized. Or is it a hierarchy where it's have a lot of control and a lot of internal focus? And those four types, if you kind of look at them as a quadrant, flexible being the top, control being on the bottom, left side internal, and right side external, you can kind of map those things out into those different quadrants where a clan might be top left corner, flexible, and internally focused. An hierocracy might be top right corner, flexible, external focused. A market might be bottom right corner, external, control focused. And a hierarchy might be internally focused left corner, bottom control focused. Okay? Again, clan, ad hocracy, market hierarchy. What type of business are you? What type of team do you have? Another way to look at that is you know, a collaborative or a clan approach is looking for the long-term development of us together. We're gonna do things together. Okay? And ad hocracy, right, likes to create things. We're might we don't have to necessarily do it together, but we're gonna do things first. Or if you want to compete in the marketplace, maybe you do things fast. We're not necessarily gonna do things together or do things first, but we're gonna do things fast. That's the most important thing. It's about control. We might not do it first, we might not even be um doing it fast, we might even have to do it together. We're gonna do things right. That's the control side. Okay? All those ways are different ways of building a team culture. And you don't have to be in one or the other. There's no right or wrong. Just understand the team culture that you have. If you want to look at an example of different types of cultures, look at the early church from 30 to 100 AD. It has a very fluid structure. Um, you had apostles, okay? Um, in Acts chapter 1, 21 through 26. It talks about the apostles. They're kind of the foundation, right? They're the ones who provide the foundation theology, foundational theology that were close to God, close to Christ, right? And they they were they were they sent out certain people, okay? They sent out prophets and teachers, okay? Acts chapter 13, uh, verse 4. Sending out those prophets and teachers to teach. Or the apostles sending out the commissioned, which are the elders and the overseers, the governance, right? In Acts chapter 20. Um, you can kind of see that in verses 17 and 28. And then who are they directing certain people, right? The elders direct the deacons, right? And the deacons do things, right? To serve ultimately the client, the group, the congregation, right? So the apostles commissioning the elders, the apostles sending out the prophets, the elders directing the deacons, and the prophets and teachers also supporting those deacons that ultimately serve the ecclesia, the church, the congregation. Those are different ways that a team structure can be organized, like a church, okay? Who are you ultimately serving? How are you organized? Another thing you can look at too when you look at culture and alignment is look at the independent side versus the interdependent side. Okay, so think about it this way. Again, a different kind of graph, but similar types of things. On the left side, you have independence, on the right side, you might have interdependence. At the top, you might be flexible, at the bottom you might have the word stability. So the top left corner is enjoyment and learning. It's all about independence, all about me, myself, learning, very flexible format. I'm going to develop. The interdependence part might be I'm kind of caring for others. I'm going to have a purpose when I do that. I'm serving others. If I'm doing it in a very stable manner, I'm serving those others in a very safe way, in an orderly manner. If I'm if I'm having a lot of independence but a lot of stability with results, I'm I'm being more results-oriented and have a lot of authority-oriented. Different ways of organizing, different ways of thinking about your organization. Those all feed in the type of organizational design you're trying to achieve. So we look at organizational design, you're gonna think about a couple things. What are we going to do? What markets are we going to be in? What competencies must we have? What financial resources do we need? What kind of leaders do we need? What is our team culture like? Those are the what questions? You might have some who questions. Who are we going to serve? Who are we going to recruit and retain? You might have some how questions. How are we going to be organized? How are we going to be operating? How are we going to get better? You might have some why questions. Why do we want to do this? Why do we need to do this? So if you think about it from an organizational structure perspective, you might also see it as five different categories. What's our span of control? Whether it's going to be centralized or decentralized. What's our line of authority? We're going to be broken up into departments. And ultimately, what's our chain of command that goes along with that line of authority? But our specific chain of command for our team. Those are all things that you look at. Okay? There's different types of organizational structures. And you think about it. So if you kind of go pivot now from organizational design to organizational structure, right? There's a hierarchical structure where there's a clear boss, leader. That person might have two or three leaders that they're um they're reporting to them, and they might have two or three leaders below them. That's a kind of a hierarchical structure. You might have a matrix structure where you have a boss, but then then you have some team leaders that might be involved, let's say division heads, and you might be having geography heads on the other axis, right? So each individual person might have a geography boss and division boss. Think General Electric back in the day when it had heads of geographies and heads of divisions, right? So you have those things. That's called a matrix structure. It might be more of a team-based culture structure where you have certain team A, B, C, D, E, and those all report to somebody. Might be more network, it might be fluid. You're kind of pivoting around based off of projects or based off of ideas, or for a period of time around a certain structure that fluidly pivots into something else. But you still have a clear leader to the overall team. You know, it might be a puritist simple divisional structure where we just have not a matrix, but just we have a we have a business line, and everyone reports that business line leader to ultimately reports to the C-suite, the corporate suite. Okay? So if you kind of think about it, at the top, you have of an hierarchical pyramid, you have the executive leadership, right? And below them the senior management, middle management, supervisors, department has team leaders, and then the staff themselves. That's one way to look at a typical organization. And those typical organizations is what commonly is out there in the marketplace. I like to flip that if you can. If you were to flip that and put the leadership at the bottom of that pyramid, that leadership is really organized to support, not to be authoritative over that team, but to actually support that team, help them out, help them with time management, self-management, motivate them, train them, coach them, get them involved in things, help planning and organizing them and directing them and controlling them, yes, but it's all meant for their success, all meant for the employees to have success. When Jethro was challenged in Exodus about leading, um uh when Jethro challenged, excuse me, um, Moses with leading in Exodus the people, he told them to organize them in certain ways, right? Otherwise, otherwise Moses was gonna was gonna head with head was gonna explode. He just had too much on him. So he he encouraged encouraged Moses to organize people, the groups of fifties, right? Hundreds, and get them organized, give them give them power, delegate certain responsibility to them, right? And that's the same way today. Sometimes leaders try to take on too much. It's okay to have the ultimate authority still reside with you, the buck stops with you, in other words, but learn to delegate, learn to organize. I encourage you to uh to look at those those verses. When you're thinking also about organizational development, besides just the organizational structure and getting people together, you really want to think about how you're gonna organize and why. Okay? Okay, so you look at everything from a strategic alignment of how your team might be organized to how it's gonna be governed. Okay, is there gonna be a board of directors? Is there not gonna be a board of directors? Is there gonna be um different types of leaders that have certain control over certain subjects, or do we have um department heads that kind of act as an error all be all end all to an individual staff member? What's our process, right? How are we gonna automate things? Right? What's our capacity? And over and eventually what's our actual operations? How are we gonna roll this out? How are we gonna build our team and how we're gonna deploy things? Those are all parts of organizational development. For organizational development to be successful, I'm gonna remind you a couple things to think about. I want you to always think about it being centered around your employees and to include them in the planning process. If it's not for them, what are you doing it for? You also want to build trust within the company. If you're not building trust, what are you actually trying to do? Also, focus on talent, talent development, and performance management. When you focus on the talent themselves, you're actually telling that talent that you care about them and you're building the systems that support that talent. So you have a very creative individual, you want to support that talent. So that talent can be very creative. If they're wasting their time doing things that don't make sense, that's a waste of their time. And eventually they'll get frustrated, may eventually leave. You want to increase employee satisfaction and at the same time increase your client satisfaction. So again, if it's a process organization that doesn't do those two things, why are you doing that or why are you organized like that? And you want to reframe your work culture into being a supportive team that actually helps people out. Okay? I want to end on this one more question for you all. What kind of leader are you? What kind of team do you want to have developed around you? Do you want a team that's that has to run to you for everything? Hopefully not. Do you want a team that's organized in a way that trusts each other? Hopefully, yes. Do you want a team that knows how to take care of itself in the crisis? Hopefully. They don't get that way overnight. So how are you gonna do to train them? How are you gonna organize them? How are you going to deploy your team? Organizational development and design are extremely important. So what kind of leader are you? Are you a leader at the top of an organization, in the middle, or at the bottom? My challenge to you is to lead where you are and think about team organization and team development and everything that you do. That's it for this this week. God bless each of you. Have a blessed day. Take care. You sound okay? Alright, man.