Healthy Organizations

I work with a lot of com­pan­ies and or­gan­iz­a­tions. It’s amaz­ing how quickly you can de­term­ine if an or­gan­iz­a­tion is work­ing well. Or, sadly, isn’t.

I’ve be­gun to make a list of the char­ac­ter­ist­ics I see in or­gan­iz­a­tions that I refer to as “healthy”.

  • The lead­ers of the group listen.
  • The lead­ers of the group com­mu­nic­ate.
  • The group un­der­stands its pur­pose.
  • The group un­der­stands how it works.
  • In­di­vidu­als un­der­stand their roles and are em­powered to do them.
  • There is a plan. It makes sense.
  • There is a man­aged, gov­erned port­fo­lio of work.
  • There is an un­der­stood gov­ernance and de­cision mech­an­ism.
  • There are feed­back mech­an­isms that en­able the or­gan­iz­a­tion to learn and ad­apt.
  • Every­one has a craft and works to im­prove their mas­tery of it.
  • Man­agers have man­age­ment skills.
  • The or­gan­iz­a­tion­al struc­tur­al dy­nam­ics make sense.
  • The fin­an­cial dy­nam­ics and in­cent­ives are aligned with the op­er­at­ing mod­el.
  • Hir­ing well is ex­pec­ted and sup­por­ted.
  • In­clu­sion, re­spect, and pro­fes­sion­al­ism are ex­pec­ted and re­quired.
  • The em­ploy­ee base is at least as di­verse as the field of work they are in.
  • There is a cul­ture that leads to ex­e­cu­tion, im­pact, and en­gage­ment.
  • In­di­vidu­al growth and de­vel­op­ment is a part of of the or­gan­iz­a­tion.
  • Hero­ism is not ne­ces­sary for the or­gan­iz­a­tion to suc­ceed, is not in­centiv­ized, and is not pro­moted.
  • In­form­a­tion ne­ces­sary for work is broadly avail­able.

This is by no means a com­plete list. There’s some over­lap. I may add to it over time here, or re­fine it, or write some deep­er notes and ex­plan­a­tions around some of these.

I’d love to be able to take this list and hand it to any CEO or de­part­ment lead and say “hey, just do this stuff and everything will be fant­ast­ic!”

Of course, it doesn’t work that way.

For one, this is all un­proven. It’s just my list. (Maybe I’ll write a non-fic­tion book some day with these as chapter titles, then throw in a bunch of quotes and stor­ies. That should con­sti­tute proof.)

More deeply… an­oth­er as­pect of most un­healthy or­gan­iz­a­tions that I run in­to is that the prob­lems flow from the top. And those lead­ers don’t read some­thing like this and then say “hey, maybe this ap­plies to me”…

So, for now, I’ll just leave it at this: in any or­gan­iz­a­tion that I lead, I will strive to put all of these dy­nam­ics in place and to lead by ex­ample.