Empowering Leadership: Guiding Leaders Through Effective Organization Design
Steve Jobs understood that good design matters; it can increase engagement and improve efficiency, and it can be a critical driver to achieve strategic goals. With the iPhone, Jobs, in partnership with his chief designer, Jony Ive, created a product that enhanced every element of the user experience. That is what good design can do for an organization as well.
At Switch, we partner with senior leaders to develop organization designs that best position the company to achieve its strategic goals. Our approach to organization design is comprehensive and focuses on high-impact activities through three straightforward phases: Understand, Design, and Launch. In this article, we explain the importance of each phase and highlight the critical outputs that can provide your organization with a design that will take you to the next level.
“Switch jumped into our action and stood with us as we navigated how to approach organizational design, mid-merger. Their experience, professionalism, and adaptability were fabulous. They built trust with our executive team and advanced the competency of our human resource team by role-modeling collaborative strategic partnerships.”
Before we jump into the process, it is important to acknowledge that preceding any design endeavor, we partner closely with our clients to assess their readiness for organization design. This assessment helps ensure alignment around the company’s vision, strategy, values, and critical initiatives. Additionally, we look at the technical components essential to the execution of organization design to help ensure we have clarity around the quality of data and the systems that will be leveraged during the process.
For entities thinking about a reorganization or looking for design assistance due to a merger or acquisition, we recommend engaging us early in the process. Ensuring that your organization is optimally positioned for this transformative undertaking is one of the keys to success.
Now, let's dive into the details of the organization design process.
Understand
In the Understand phase, we partner with you to define the path forward and identify who will be involved. Organization design is typically highly confidential work, it’s sensitive, and complex. These elements make it critical that all stakeholders get aligned around the work, which involves being able to answer questions like:
What are the guiding principles the team can lean into when making difficult decisions?
What is the vision for the future state of the organization and do all key players understand it and support it?
Who are the team members that need to be involved in this work so that we land on the best design to take the organization into the future?
Once you have an idea of the answers to these questions and a plan for getting aligned, you’re ready to move forward. The following are three areas we focus on during the Understand phase:
Organization Vision and Strategy
We begin by understanding your organization’s vision and strategy. Good design is built with the purpose of better enabling the organization to achieve its vision. Our approach ensures that the structure, processes, and roles are purposeful, aligned, and capable of driving your organization towards its desired future state.
Culture and Engagement
We unlock potential in your company by harnessing your knowledge and our expertise in evaluating organizational culture. Understanding the culture helps ensure that the newly designed organization aligns with your values and beliefs, and that you’re treating your employees in a manner that reflects your organization’s values throughout the design process. This alignment promotes a sense of continuity and stability during times of change, and it means that your employees will be more productive and engaged as a result.
Change Management
We embed our change management methodology throughout all phases of the organization design process to accelerate understanding and adoption of the new structure, roles, and processes. We accomplish this by creating a case for change, identifying change impacts, and forming solutions to address the changes using communication, engagement, training, and socialization. By preparing people for change, we increase the likelihood that employees will adapt to the new organization and ways of working while minimizing resistance or departure.
These steps require significant time and typically result in leaders seeing the organization and each functional team from a new perspective. This phase requires a close collaboration between Switch and those who know each team best. Through this part of the process, we are continually asking clients to consider these core questions:
What unique value does each team deliver that serves the needs of the organization?
How will these needs evolve over the next 3-5 years?
What skillsets will be needed to continue to provide value to an evolving organization?
And what type of people will be most effective at leading and supporting that growth?
How does the proposed design impact the budget, both immediately and long-term?
Design
During the Design phase, we leverage our innovative and interactive approach to guide your leaders through the process of designing their organization to deliver against the business strategy and each leader’s critical initiatives. This is where organizations begin to see the details of the work.
There are three areas we focus on during the Design phase:
Operating Model
We work with your leaders to create a visual model that articulates who your organization serves, what critical and unique value your organization offers, and how your organization delivers solutions. This visual serves as the foundational element to the entire design process and it is typically what our clients lead with during the launch phase to build alignment and gain support for the proposed future-state design.
At the executive level, the operating model helps organization decision makers understand value and enables them to support the design's direction and requirements. For your team, the operating model serves as a picture of who your team is and what they are a part of; it’s not only a high-level way of working, but also a reflection of your team’s mission, vision, and purpose.
Competency Model
We guide your leaders through competency assessments to identify the competencies needed to enable the capabilities required to deliver strategic outcomes and enable tailored talent plans. Before beginning the design, we help you determine which individual roles and teams would benefit from the assessment process, and we serve as thought partners as you and your senior leaders conduct these assessments. Having a clear understanding of the competencies that you have and do not have ensures that talent placement decisions are aligned with organizational strategies.
Organization Structure and Role Planning
This is a multi-step process that includes designing the ideal structure without names and then filling out the structure either internally or externally. It is critical that your structure and your people align with your strategic vision and strategy. This is an iterative process that involves you and your key leadership working together to evaluate if you have the right talent in the right roles to achieve your business goals.
The result of these steps is that you have an operating model and organization design that better positions your team to achieve immediate and long-term goals. You will see increases in alignment, efficiency, and outputs, within your team and across the organization. The culture of your team will also be strengthened because each person will have a clear understanding of the organization’s vision and your team’s vision, and their personal role in supporting each. Clarity enhances psychological safety which is a key driver of performance.
Now that you have a design on paper, it’s time to launch.
Launch
In the Launch phase we partner with you to ensure leadership alignment and approval of future-state designs while preparing the organization and its leaders for implementation. The work already done will not matter if your organization is unable to put it into action.
For Switch, it’s important to take our clients all the way through the design approval into a stable business-as-usual status. Our experience in change management enables us to anticipate challenges to the changes and develop activities and communications to manage through them. Additionally, our experience in process design enables us to help you identify new ways of working that unlock the new design’s potential. Finally, our experience serving as trusted thought partners to senior leaders at the highest levels of Fortune 500 organizations enables us to help you navigate the approval process.
There are two areas we focus on during the Launch phase:
Ways of Working
We support new ways of working by mapping out how cross-functional work gets done to enable a smooth transition to the future state. This is where the operating model and organization design meet the real world; the design is only as good as its ability to function within the broader organization. We help you and your leaders collaboratively design across functions to ensure when it’s time to launch the liftoff is successful.
Organization Design Implementation
We partner with your leaders to facilitate a smooth transition to the new organization using planning and communication along with engagement tools and techniques to support people leaders, while engaging employees appropriately and increasing their confidence to embrace the new structure. It is critical to identify the right timing with the right messaging across all stakeholder groups. Doing so will mitigate significant risk and result in a successful and supported launch.
Whether you lead a function within an organization or the entire enterprise, your organization design is critical to success. A well thought out and implemented design positions your team to effectively pursue strategic initiatives.
When you bring Switch in to partner with you, we learn who you are, the vision you have, and the goals you want to achieve. We work side-by-side with you and your leadership to conduct assessments and then develop models that are unique to your culture and your needs. Throughout, we employ change management to ensure that despite the disruption, your workforce feels informed, excited, and empowered to launch into the future.
Good design makes a difference because, like the shift from the flip phone to the iPhone, it enhances who you are and how you accomplish your goals. At Switch, we’re passionate about helping you design an organization that enables your workforce to perform at the highest levels, while nurturing your culture and your people throughout the journey.
For more information about Switch and how we can help you, send us an email at contact@switchconsultinggroup.com. If you’re interested in receiving our latest articles in your inbox or hearing about upcoming webinars, submit your email address in the “Stay in the Know” form below.