5 Lenses To Reframe Your Organization
Effective organizations are those that successfully meet their goals to remain competitive. However, when organizations seek to increase their effectiveness, they often practice outdated techniques, such as headcount reduction or reporting line shuffles.
Although these tactics can be practical for specific situations, repeating them can have an adverse effect. You could risk demotivating your workforce and eroding your company’s competitive edge.
The 5 Lenses
Consider a mindset shift to encompass a versatile view around Strategy, Capabilities, Structure, Process, and Mindset. This will shine a light on all the issues plaguing your organization to develop a clearer perspective. Implementing changes in one area without considering how they impact others will lead to becoming out of sync, or in photographic terms, out of focus.
As photographers do, business executives should use a variety of lenses to seek diverse perspectives for optimal results. Here are the 5 lenses of organizational effectiveness that you should adopt.
Lens #1: Strategy
A lack of clear priorities is one of the top reasons for strategy execution failure. If you do not know where you are heading, a random road may or may not lead you to success. In this continuously changing business environment, your people need to align on how your goals can be executed.
When was the last time you and your team reflected on your distinctive quality to win in the marketplace? What would your customers say? If there is a distinction between both versions, it may be time to ask if the basic assumptions about your business are still valid.
Having clarity regarding how organizations use their resources to create a competitive advantage is critical to build an effective organization.
Lens #2: Capabilities
In a 2020 survey by McKinsey, the proportion of respondents who rated the importance of capability building to a company’s long-term growth as “very” or “extremely” important jumped to 78%, which is a 19% increase compared to pre-pandemic times. However, 45% of them do not have any significant plans to build capability.
Assessing how critical roles contribute towards your strategic goals can help you identify any significant gaps in roles or skills. Keep in mind that external capabilities should also be included in this review and analyzed based on vulnerability and risk management.
The pandemic led to an astronomical rise in online learning. Coursera declared a 644% rise in its 2020 enrolment compared to 2019. Since nearly half the companies do not have a building capability plan, it remains unclear how this learning increase contributes to the business’s strategic goals.
Lens #3: Structure
Do you know the rationale behind your organization’s structure? Many companies’ structures change over time through the revolving doors of their leaders. In REORG, Heidari-Robinson and Heywood highlighted the common pitfalls of reorganization, especially organizational design focusing on reporting lines.
Think about how well your workforce aligns with your current structure. Critical roles that are not utilized in the right parts of your business cannot realize their true potential. If you are a product-oriented business and your engineers are not showcasing their strengths, you have missed opportunities. Keep this link to strategy as the guiding principle to contemplate your current structure’s strengths and weaknesses.
Lens #4: Process
Organizations often launch enterprise wide process improvement initiatives but end up with no significant changes. A more practical way is to use customer journey mapping to identify the areas that need improving for the customer. Evaluate these in tandem with the effectiveness of the underlying systems that expose your pain points.
How frictionless are your processes? The sole purpose of controls are to manage risk. Validations that add no value other than serving as speed bumps for another team should be eliminated.
Tracking your key processes helps to maintain a steady pace. If the data shared includes leading indicators of your business performance, this can signal when intervention is required before it hits your bottom-line.
Lens #5: Mindset
Regarding the direction of your organization and the observed weaknesses observed through the other lenses, what behaviors are working against your business? Employee surveys can provide valuable insights, as well as customer satisfaction and social media feedbacks. What are the underlying beliefs that are driving these behaviors?
The most important factor to review is the extent to which your organization has a growth mindset. According to Carol Dweck, people with a fixed mindset believe that talents are fixed traits that cannot be improved. On the contrary, people with a growth mindset fathom that skills and talents can be nurtured if enough effort is invested.
If your business operates in a continuously changing environment, nurturing a growth mindset is the most important strategic move that a CEO can inspire.
Your Organizational Snapshot
Organizations are living and breathing entities, with different internal and external forces pulling them in various directions. Thoroughly analyzing your organizational effectiveness in each silo can potentially lead to adverse domino effects.
Assessing your effectiveness through the 5 lenses enables you to understand how they interchange. It keeps your eye on the bigger picture of working toward your strategic goals. Furthermore, engaging your team during the review is an empowering and inclusive move.
A Call To Action
The role of HR has never been more vital as companies navigate through these rough seas of change. CHROs can partner with their CEOs to facilitate this extensive review. Hiring an external consultant to streamline the process is an exceptionally viable solution to provide a vantage point from a fresh perspective.
Although organizational development is not a fixed science set in stone, adopting a holistic view of Strategy, Capabilities, Structure, Process, and Mindset can provide an enhanced focus. Effective leadership is the primary motivational force. To quote Henry David Thoreau, “It’s not what you look at that matters. It’s what you see,”
With these 5 lenses, you can reframe business problems, refocus your attention and resources, and re-energize your workforce towards a new vision of achieving greatness.
Valerie Tan Ronchail specializes in Organizational Strategies and Leadership Coaching. She’s also an avid photographer who’s on a quest to create her first NFT. You can connect with Valerie at valerie@mingz.co
