Organizing for the age
of urgency PART
II
Capability
In order to operate
with urgency and pursue the agility that makes high performance possible,
you’re likely going to have to fill some serious capability gaps along the way.
What’s more, many of the critical skills your people need—as individuals, team
members, and leaders—are changing rapidly as a result of workplace automation
and AI. As less complex work becomes increasingly automated, workers will need
to be able not just to perform in concert with machines but also to adapt to
uncertainty. And the more that information-rich tools are used (and the more
effective they become), the harder it will be to achieve the proper balance
between person and machine—a challenge that amplifies, in turn, the importance
of continuous learning, employee development, and consistent leadership.
Personalize talent programs
When direction comes
primarily from “the boss,” your company will need more bosses to keep on
course. That’s one reason so many organizations are too tall and bureaucratic.
But if capabilities bubble up from within, and learning is personalized for
individuals and not the masses, employees can act more urgently and, usually,
more effectively.
Fortunately,
organizations are gaining new tools—especially in people analytics—that will
enable them to manage and develop their people with greater precision than ever
before. Examples include a fast-food restaurant chain that, after extensive testing, was able to
identify and teach behaviors that would inspire colleagues; rigorous research
and statistical analyses used by Alphabet to inform (but
not replace) its engineers’ human judgment about people decisions; and, in the
case of one insurer, identifying which
employees would benefit most from which types of learning opportunities.
Rethink your leadership model
Central to talent
development is a company’s leadership model. Leadership can come from anyone,
not just from those in positions of formal authority. Think about your own
firm: sometimes an employee can be a leader and sometimes a follower, because
while no one employee knows everything, many are likely at the leading edge
of something. What’s more, leaders in agile organizations lead less
by control than by influence. In one workshop we frequently conduct, we ask
executives how they would solve a given issue. Most are direct—they identify
the problem and then fix it. A smaller group will drill down to the problem’s
root cause and fix that instead. Only a very few take a more holistic approach;
they consider how to create the conditions in which an ecosystem can be largely
self-managing, where individuals and tools can learn and problems can be
avoided before they manifest.
This, we believe, is
what the urgency and uncertainty of the competitive future will demand. The
traditional model of a charismatic leader who gets results by force of will has
long proved expensive and is fast becoming outdated. Leaders should strive,
instead, to empower the organization as a whole, to be felt but not seen, to be
inspiring but not indispensable—and not to insist that everyone else should be
just like them. Such leadership rests on the ability to adapt and on congruence
with the essence of your organization.
Identity
All of which leads into
a fundamental challenge for urgency: If you build this kind of “control light”
organization, and it’s moving that fast—how do you keep your bullet train from
running off the rails? Our research shows that speed needs to be channeled into
stable processes, tasks, and roles if you’re going to stay healthy as you move
quickly. Realistically, lots of those sources of stability are going to get
upended by workplace automation, as
we’ve noted before. As well, operating with the urgency and agility we’re
describing, and overhauling organizational capabilities constantly to keep and exceed
competitive pace, can seem unsettling. And resource reallocation plainly
changes people’s lives. It’s hard, therefore, to keep your organization pulling
together when there’s so much ambiguity, so much shifting around, and too
little sense of why.
Adopt a recipe to run the place
While there’s no pat
answer to this uncertainty, following a clear recipe is an effective way to
start. By its very definition, a recipe is a defined set of conditions and
constraints. In siloed firms, one sees a wide array of processes and practices,
executed in dramatically different fashion across the organization (and
sometimes within the same silo). It makes for an incongruous hash, with
ingredients from management books over the last 20 years—a pinch of this and a
dash of that.
By contrast, the
healthiest firms—those most capable of sustaining performance and renewing over
time—have a much simpler approach: they don’t sample à la carte. Our research
shows that four distinct recipes are
particularly effective, and having the discipline to stick with any one of them
is critical. In fact, organizational discipline is one of the foundations of
both corporate health and operational performance.
Nor are “health” and
“operational results” binary choices. To keep from losing their way,
organizations must prioritize both at all times. That adds up to a virtuous
cycle that accelerates and enhances performance, even for fairly mundane
initiatives such as squeezing a bit more margin from better pricing or lowering
costs through more effective procurement. It also helps ground the company and
the people who comprise it, even in times of momentous change.
Cultivate purpose, values, and social
connection
If you conceive of your
organization as more than just a collection of roles and processes, you’ll be
far more prepared for the uncertainty ahead. Aligning around common principles
is a large part of what an organization of the future is all about:
participants making decisions under defined rules of engagement, collaborating
to create value, and earning the credibility to lead rather than having
“leadership” be imposed from on high.
Employees reach higher
when their energies are channeled toward a higher purpose. Because different
people find inspiration from different sources, it takes range to strike a
chord that will resonate with almost everyone. Smart organizations hit every
note—and mean it. That calls for walking the talk in, among other areas, race
and gender diversity,
social impact, and diversity of political expression. Some employees are most
inspired by personal development (and, it must be said, monetary compensation);
others find passion in objectives geared more toward their working team, the
company as a whole, its customers, and even society at large. Cultivating
purpose requires you to sharpen your organization’s sense of mission and
strengthen your employees’ social connection.
There’s an old quip
that “everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”
With reorganizations, it’s too often the reverse: everybody does a reorg, but
nobody likes to talk about it. That’s because reorganizations are hard to get right,
distract everybody from senior leadership on down, and have real consequences
for meeting investor expectations. And even if you’re game for continual
top-down revisions, mantras such as “The only constant around here is change!”
run the risk of bewildering employees.
Ironically, shifting to
urgency can stave off the ceaseless reorganization cycling. In the face of
today’s massive disruptions, an ethos of urgency actually serves to smooth
gyrations between “hurry up” and “settle in.” Of course, urgency alone can also
be a recipe for dysfunction. But combine urgency with agility, capability, and
identity, and you’ve got an organization that can play fast and long. The
future will be both.
By Aaron De Smet and Chris GagnonMcKinsey
Quarterly January 2018
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/organizing-for-the-age-of-urgency?cid=other-eml-alt-mkq-mck-oth-1801&hlkid=9fbbe22d8c8d4c2799d92bc1e999a291&hctky=1627601&hdpid=1029e5c6-9e96-4610-8480-97ea9fc5f8cc
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