Check Your Expectations of Your Organisation

What you find challenging about your leaders, managers or colleagues may be a direct result of and reveal more about the organisational structure, systems, processes and culture than anything else. If so, this may help you appreciate that sometimes, we are all in this together, experiencing different facets of the same problem: we are getting the behaviours our organisations designed and perpetuate. Addressing the challenges from this perspective can lead to useful insights and considerate actions.

"Structure influences behavior. When placed in the same system,
people, however different, tend to produce similar results."
- Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of The Learning Organization

A 2,000 Year Old Leftover

Despite being manifestly unfit for the current aspirations and needs of most workers these days, hierarchical structures remain almost universally the structural basis of organisational life.

Hierarchies were designed by the Romans over 2,000 years ago for the purpose of imposing structural control over a body of people (the Roman military) to enable a power elite to efficiently achieve its ends. The model spread via the churches to become the basis of most education, business, scientific, medical, religious and social organisations.

If you are employed within one, no matter how "flat" the structure or good-willed the people, you have consented to an unequal arrangement of power and you are not constitutionally entitled to full consultation, collaboration or consideration of your needs. You have agreed to yield at least some degree of autonomy and control over your own decision-making about almost everything work-related, including what kind of culture prevails.

If at times you feel frustrated by the organisation's failure to operate as a fair, considerate, consensual collective providing unlimited autonomy and opportunities for collaboration over direction-setting and priorities or even reasonable freedom of choice - it's likely you're being a tad unrealistic and may need to get over it! Try modifying your expectations of hierarchies to more accurately reflect what they are capable of.

Information and knowledge within a hierarchy is intended to and generally does, flow upwards and power downwards from the most powerful to the less powerful. The power elite assume responsibility - if not for everything at all times, then certainly for holding the last line of decision-making and power of veto. This thereby ensures that the less powerful acquire a corresponding degree of irresponsibility or helplessness because they know that whatever they think, decide or desire, can be ignored or over-ruled. Far from bringing out the best in people, this form of organising often brings out the worst in them.

These days, hierarchies don't quite produce the efficiencies they were capable of when people were more pliant and less independent, (at the height of the industrial revolution for instance), so most modern hierarchical organisations work very hard to minimise the effects of the power arrangement, even calling themselves "teams" and "communities". I've even heard CEOs of government agencies argue strongly that their organisations are definitely not hierarchical, even though public legislation requires them to be and their employment contracts clearly specify hierarchical decision-making.

The Structure Produces Certain Inevitable Effects

But whatever the values and personalities of a hierarchy's leadership, there's no escaping at least some of the inevitable effects on the organisation: high levels of tension, competition, frustration, resentment, boredom, indifference and apathy. These represent or produce a great deal of inefficiency and are the polar opposite of what people in the modern workplace need to function well in organisations.

Add to these effects those arising from groupings in which communication is also inhibited by the size of the organisation and you have the groundwork for serious organisational dysfunction. Research reported by Malcolm Gladwell in his book The Tipping Point suggests that a grouping beyond 150 people has, historically, been found too big. He finds evidence that modern businesses work best in groupings no larger.

"A jillion smart, energetic people submitting to the 'right' incentives won't get you a micrometer closer to the customer unless the dead weight of a vertical hierarchy is lifted - almost entirely - off their backs. There's no liberation when much more than a semblance of the superstructure remains."
- Tom Peters, Liberation Management

I'm not arguing against hierarchies here (though Tom Peters seems to, and I do elsewhere): I can and do work with them although I believe they're past their use-by and there are far better ways of organising. Rather, I want to encourage realism and pragmatism. It may be a cliché but it is often true: it's not the people, it's the system in which they work.

Although there is much that can be done to moderate or nullify the negative effects of hierarchical structures (most of EncourageMentors' website is devoted to strategy for this), one of the first steps to constructive action involves acceptance of what is. Then we can use energy that might otherwise be spent in complaining and feeling victimised, finding new strategies and habituating skills to respond creatively to that reality, including learning how to enhance the ways people are treated and their potential harnessed.

One of the most promising ideas I've found for improving conventional organisations lies within Open Strategy - a book (by New Zealand authors Phil Driver and David Armstrong), a website and an approach functioning as an international business and movement using " . . . an alternative to the traditional, top-down management and strategy planning processes that too often fail to achieve outcomes that benefit communities and their stakeholders, by providing tools to allow stakeholders within a community to work together in a collaborative, transparent, and strategic manner."

We Get the Behaviours Our Organisations Design and Perpetuate

Organisational Improvement Consultant and author Jim Clemmer takes a closer look at the kinds of dysfunctional effects created by organisational structures: If we are unhappy with the behavior of people on our team or in our organization, he says, we need to take a closer look at the system and structure they're working in. The following table is adapted from his work:

If people in the workplace . . .	They're probably working in . . .
Behave like bureaucrats	A bureaucracy
Behave as though they are helpless, immmature and irresponsible	An untrusting, controlling chain of command that takes responsibility rather than expects and nurtures self-responsibility, providing people little opportunity for real control over their work processes and support systems
Are mistrusting of managers or of one another	An organisation led by mistrustful leadership lacking in self-confidence
Are disorganised	A culture of improvisation and absence of systematic methodology
Function in competition with or opposition to one another or other in-house groups, or with little regard to the impact of their functioning on others	A leadership vacuum
Get away with non-performance, non-conformance, non-compliance or failure to uphold standards or keep commitments	A leadership climate without clear boundaries; of not holding people accountable; of not providing consequences for compliance failures
Arrive late for meetings and appointments	A culture in which unpunctuality is modeled by senior staff
Are not customer-focused	A structure and within systems that do not serve the servers and/or customers
Have a wide array of incongruent standards	An organisation uncommitted to its espoused values or unwilling to clarify and uphold them
Are intimidating and controlling	A system they experience as non-responsive to or threatening their interests and needs
Behave like overly-needy people	A culture that is unresponsive to human needs
Not innovative	A controlled, inflexible organisation
Antipathetic to teamwork and collaboration	An organisation designed to reward individual performance
Resist change	An organisation that values the status quo more than it values growth and development
Disrespectful and/or non-consultative	A system they experience as disrespectful and non-consultative of their individuality and needs
Cynical	An organisational culture that punishes them for behaving like the system, structure or processes they've been forced into.

Organization structures and systems have the same affect on the people in them. They either limit or liberate their performance potential . . . "Empowering" helpless people without changing the processes, structure, or systems they work in, is worse than useless. It increases helplessness and cynicism.
- Jim Clemmer

If you're not going to join a differently-structured organisation (The Royal Society of Anarchists, for example) or form your own outfit, you may want to learn to work more serenely with whatever it is you already have. I find support in the wisdom of others who've wrestled with these matters and already resolved some of them.

Here's what a Catholic nun, talking about her struggles with the authority, control, rigidity and some of the dogma of her church, had to say when discussing her ability to remain calm in the midst of that particular storm: she was asked, Are you serene?

"If you define serenity as blind acceptance of a bad situation, then I'm not serene. But if you define serenity as being willing to surrender to present circumstances while keeping a vision of a better future in mind, then I am that. I know things move slowly, and I know that massive injustice continues if nobody points out that the emperor has no clothes.

"Was Mahatma Gandhi serene? He was indeed, but he led one of the greatest revolutions we've ever seen. Was Martin Luther Kin Jr. serene? Yes, he had a rock inside him.

"Serenity is being aware of both what is and what can be, and having the patience to get from the former to the latter. The opposite of serenity is when you destroy what is, in pursuit of what ought to be. And those who take that route destroy themselves as well as the society around them."
70 year-old Benedictine nun and author Sister Joan Chittister,
interviewed by James Kullander in "Be Not Silent" (The Sun, June 2007).

Further discussion:

Fantasy: More Painful Than Reality

Talk to us for further information or support with these ideas.

Tom Watkins
© Copyright 2002 - 2007 Tom Watkins Group. All rights reserved.

Select and contact a Mentor if you'd like to discuss these ideas or want support to make progress with your own issues.

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