When performance starts to wobble in a growing business, there’s a very tempting conclusion: “We need better people”. Someone more experienced, more commercial, more organised.
Someone who takes more initiative, communicates better and doesn’t need so much managing.
Perhaps. But before you start recruiting, coaching or quietly wondering whether you’ve got the wrong team, there’s another question worth asking:
Have you actually made it possible for the people you’ve already got to do a good job?
We generally tend to think of performance as something that belongs to the individual. They’re either good at their job or they’re not.
In reality, performance is also a product of the organisation around them.
Put good people into a confusing system – unclear responsibilities, competing priorities, fuzzy decision-making, too many meetings, constant interruptions – and you can make them look surprisingly mediocre.
Put perfectly ordinary, capable people into a well-designed organisation and something much more interesting happens: they become more effective.
Not because you’ve suddenly transformed the people, but because you’ve made it easier for them to succeed.
Imagine you have a manager who constantly misses deadlines…
It’s easy to conclude that she needs to improve her time management. But look a little closer.
She reports to two directors, both of whom give her work. Nobody has agreed which takes priority. She is invited to almost every meeting because nobody is quite sure who needs to be there. Half the decisions she needs are sitting with the founder, who is permanently overloaded. And three members of her team regularly bring problems to her because their own authority has never been clearly defined.
You could send her on a time-management course – or you could redesign the system she is working in.
This is why I’m increasingly interested in the apparently unglamorous subject of organisational design: done well, it removes friction – and it helps people succeed.
People know what they are responsible for, what they are expected to deliver and where their authority begins and ends. They understand the priorities. They know which decisions they can make themselves and which genuinely need escalating.
Communication has a purpose rather than simply becoming an ever-expanding collection of meetings, messages and copied-in emails.
In other words, people can get on with their jobs and be effective.
Growing businesses often run on heroics
In the early days of a business, this matters much less.
There are relatively few people. Everybody knows what’s going on. If something falls between the cracks, someone spots it and picks it up (often that someone is the founder).
And because the business is small, the system works remarkably well – until it doesn’t.
As the organisation grows, informal arrangements start to creak. There are more people, more clients, more handovers and more decisions. The founder can no longer see everything. People start bumping into one another.
Very often, the response is heroic effort – people work longer hours. The reliable ones pick up the slack. Managers become sticking plasters, filling every gap in the organisation. The founder steps back in because things aren’t happening quickly enough.
And, for a while, it works. And that is precisely the problem, because heroic effort can disguise poor organisation design for a surprisingly long time.
What if your best people stopped compensating for the system?
It’s an interesting question.
- What would happen if your most conscientious people stopped remembering everything that nobody has written down?
- What if your best manager stopped sorting out problems that technically belong somewhere else?
- What if the founder stopped being the unofficial information hub, final decision-maker and emergency service?
Would the organisation still work?
If the answer is no, you may not have a people problem at all. You have a system that depends upon particular individuals compensating for its weaknesses.
And that makes growth increasingly difficult.
Good systems don’t turn people into robots
There is an understandable resistance to systems in smaller businesses.
Founders often fear bureaucracy. They don’t want to become “corporate”. They don’t want endless processes, complicated reporting structures or rules governing every conceivable situation – neither do I.
Good organisation design isn’t about adding complexity. Quite the opposite; the best systems are often beautifully simple. They answer all the basic questions:
- Who owns this?
- What does good performance look like?
- What are our priorities?
- Who makes this decision?
- Where does information need to go?
- When do we need to talk to one another – and when don’t we?
Answer those questions properly and you remove an enormous amount of wasted effort.
And you give people more freedom, not less, because when the boundaries are clear, people don’t have to keep checking.
Make success easier
We spend a great deal of time trying to improve people.
We train, coach and motivate them. We also sometimes recruit supposedly better versions of them.
All of those things have their place. But perhaps there is another question worth asking first:
How easy have we made it for an ordinary, capable person to succeed here?
If someone has to be exceptionally resilient, politically astute, endlessly flexible and willing to work ridiculous hours simply to do a decent job, that isn’t evidence of a high-performance culture, it’s evidence of a badly designed organisation.
The strongest organisations don’t depend upon everyone being exceptional.
They create clarity. They remove unnecessary friction. They make accountability visible. They build sensible communication and decision-making into the way the organisation works.
They don’t rely on heroes, they make good performance easier.
And that, surely, is what a good system is for.