Organizational Chart Quotes

Every time I read a management or self-help book, I find myself saying, “That’s fine, but that wasn’t really the hard thing about the situation.” The hard thing isn’t setting a big, hairy, audacious goal. The hard thing is laying people off when you miss the big goal. The hard thing isn’t hiring great people. The hard thing is when those “great people” develop a sense of entitlement and start demanding unreasonable things. The hard thing isn’t setting up an organizational chart. The hard thing is getting people to communicate within the organization that you just designed. The hard thing isn’t dreaming big. The hard thing is waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat when the dream turns into a nightmare.

The hard thing isn’t setting up an organizational chart. The hard thing is getting people to communicate within the organization that you just designed.

maybe life is a cobweb, not an organizational chart.

You should never be able to reverse engineer a company’s organizational chart from the design of its product.

Being a leader doesn’t mean you have people reporting to you on an organizational chart—leadership is about inspiring and motivating those around you. A good leader affects a team’s ability to deliver code, architect good systems, and apply Lean principles to how the team manages its work and develops products. All of these have a measurable impact on an organization’s profitability, productivity, and market share.

I’m a bottom-up manager who subscribes to the concept of “servant leadership,” as articulated by the late Robert Greenleaf. He believed that organizations are at their most effective when leaders encourage collaboration, trust, foresight, listening, and empowerment. In any hierarchy, it’s clear that the ultimate boss (in my case, me) holds the most power. But a wonderful thing happens when you flip the traditional organizational chart upside down so that it looks like a V with the boss on the bottom. My job is to serve and support the next layer “above” me so that the people on that layer can then serve and support the next layer “above” them, and so on.

Here’s what turns a successful hierarchy into one that impedes progress: when too many people begin, subconsciously, to equate their own value and that of others with where they fall in the pecking order. Thus, they focus their energies on managing upward while treating people beneath them on the organizational chart poorly. The people I have seen do this seem to be acting on animal instinct, unaware of what they are doing. This problem is not caused by hierarchy itself but by individual or cultural delusions associated with hierarchy, chiefly those that assign personal worth based on rank. By not thinking about how and why we value people, we can fall into this trap almost by default.

People with ADHD can put coping strategies in place that help them to plan more effectively, but both members of the couple need to be conscious that this requires significant effort and lots of organizational tools such as lists, charts, conversations, and the like. Don’t assume that just because you are both adults, you can also both plan well.

Delegation—the assigning of things (work or a task) to individuals. Jethro told Moses to delegate the lesser tasks so he could focus on the major issues of leading the nation of Israel to the promised land. Delegation involves three important elements: Clearly assigning the responsibility the individual is entrusted with. Granting the necessary authority and ability to accomplish the task assigned. Holding the person accountable for the completion of the assigned task. Delegation is not giving an unpleasant task to someone, nor is it getting rid of work to make your workday less than responsible. It is, however: Sharing the work with individuals who have the capability so that you may concentrate on more challenging or more difficult assignments. Providing a format whereby individuals can mature and learn through on-the-job work. Encouraging others to become part of the organization by participative task accomplishment. Allowing individuals to exercise their special gifts and abilities. An important element of the organizational structure of the church is the granting of authority to accomplish the task. Authority is the right to invoke compliance by subordinates on the basis of the formal position in the organizational structure and upon the controls the formal organization has placed on that position. Authority is linked to the position, not the person. Authority is derived in various ways: Position Reputation Experience Expertise Authority and responsibility are directly linked. When you give someone responsibility for a task, then the individual should be given the ability to see to it that the task is accomplished. Responsibility and accountability are also directly linked. If the individual is given the responsibility for a task as well the authority/ability to see to its accomplishment, then it is the manager or administrator’s responsibility to hold the individual accountable to complete the task in the manner assigned and planned. Elements of describing the use of organizational authority include: The use of an organizational chart that establishes the chain of command. The use of functional authority, assigning to individuals in other elements of the organization the authority to administer and control elements of the organization outside their own. Defining span of control, defining within the task assignment specifically what elements of the organization the individual has authority over.

You should never be able to reverse engineer a company’s organizational chart from the design of its product. Can you figure out who reigns supreme at Apple when you open the box for your new iPhone? Yes. It’s you, the customer; not the head of software, manufacturing, retail, hardware, apps, or the Guy Who Signs the Checks. That is exactly as it should be.

The relations outlined on an organization chart provide a framework within which fuller and more spontaneous human behavior takes place. The formal system may draw upon that behavior for added strength; it will in its turn be subordinated to personal and group egotism. Every official and employee will try to use his position to satisfy his {9} psychological needs. This may result in a gain for the organization if he accepts its goals and extends himself in its interests. But usually, even in the best circumstances, some price is paid in organizational rigidity.

The hard thing isn’t setting up an organizational chart. The hard thing is getting people to communicate within the organization that you just designed. The

We build these systems: organizational charts, procedures, chain of command and we say it is to provide order. To give us the structure that we need to be able to thrive. But more often than not, these systems, erected and convoluted by humans, serve as a means to hold some higher and keep others lower. The most pervasive example of this being the workplace. Lab, cubicle, high-rise, whatever the location: it’s all the same. Someone is below a certain paygrade; some people matter more. It’s all so cruel how we capture each other in these snares. So of course, when everything broke down, it revealed the worst of us. We had been feeding and nourishing that behavior for centuries, practicing our ability to marginalize someone, belittle them, shrink them down so small that we could just flick them away.

What do you do when you have two outstanding employees who logically both fit in the same place on the organizational chart? Perhaps you have a world-class architect who is running engineering, but she does not have the experience to scale the organization to the next level. You also have an outstanding operational person who is not great technically. You want to keep both in the company, but you only have one position. So you get the bright idea to put “two in the box” and take on a little management debt. The short-term benefits are clear: you keep both employees, you don’t have to develop either because they will theoretically help each other develop, and you instantly close the skill set gap. Unfortunately, you will pay for those benefits with interest and at a very high rate.

The hard thing is when those “great people” develop a sense of entitlement and start demanding unreasonable things. The hard thing isn’t setting up an organizational chart. The hard thing is getting people to communicate within the organization that you just designed. The hard thing isn’t dreaming big. The hard thing is waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat

Furthermore, it is not at all clear that the “official” organizational charts of companies represents the actuality of what the real operational network structures are. Who is really communicating with whom, how often are they doing it, how much do they exchange, and so on? What is really needed is access to all of the company’s communication channels, such as the phone calls, the e-mails, the meetings, et cetera, quantified analogously to the cell phone data we used for helping to develop a science of cities.

A clear and current organizational chart, with some discussion, can clear up far more of the culture challenge than you might think. It’s

In one of his first exploits, he called into Nokia from his own mobile phone and pretended to be a senior executive at the company. By studying the organizational chart and learning some detailed facts about the company, he was able to persuade someone in the IT department of his falsified identity. Mitnick claimed that he lost his copy of Nokia’s top mobile phone’s source code and needed it sent right away or he would be in big trouble. With this ruse, he was able to trick his mark into action. The loyal and unsuspecting employee complied, and within 15 minutes, Mitnick had the most important and confidential intellectual property of a multinational conglomerate.

In most companies, the directives flow down the organizational chart. But at Twilio, Stripe, and many other companies that believe in small teams, it’s the reverse.

Here’s what turns a successful hierarchy into one that impedes progress: when too many people begin, subconsciously, to equate their own value and that of others with where they fall in the pecking order. Thus, they focus their energies on managing upward while treating people beneath them on the organizational chart poorly.

Organization and division of function carry an inherent tendency to distributive power, deriving from supervision and coordination. For the division of power is deceptive: Although it involves specialization of function at all levels, the top overlooks and directs the whole. Those who occupy supervisory and coordinating position have immense organizational superiority over the others. The interaction and communication networks actually center their function , as can be seen easily enough in the organizational chart possessed by every modern firm. The chart allows superiors to control the entire organization, and it prevents those at the bottom from sharing in this control. It enables those at the top to set in motion machinery for implementing collective goals. Though anyone can refuse to obey, opportunities are probably lacking for establishing alternative machinery for implementing their goals. As Mosca notes, "The power of any minority is irresistible as against any single individual in the majority, who stands alone before the totality of the organized minority." The few at the top can keep the masses compliant, provided their control is institutionalized in the laws and norms of the social group in which they operate. Institutionalization is necessary to achieve routine collective goals; and thus distributive power, that is, social stratification, also becomes an institutionalized feature of social life. There is, thus, a simple answer to why the masses do not revolt-a perennial problem for social stratification- and it does not concern value consensus, or force, or exchange in the usual sense of those convenient sociological explanations. The masses comply because they lack collective organization to do otherwise, because they are embedded within collective and distributive power organizations controlled by others. They are organizationally outflanked

Structured methods for learning Method Uses Useful for Organizational climate and employee satisfaction surveys Learning about culture and morale. Many organizations do such surveys regularly, and a database may already be available. If not, consider setting up a regular survey of employee perceptions. Useful for managers at all levels if the analysis is available specifically for your unit or group. Usefulness depends on the granularity of the collection and analysis. This also assumes the survey instrument is a good one and the data have been collected carefully and analyzed rigorously. Structured sets of interviews with slices of the organization or unit Identifying shared and divergent perceptions of opportunities and problems. You can interview people at the same level in different departments (a horizontal slice) or bore down through multiple levels (a vertical slice). Whichever dimension you choose, ask everybody the same questions, and look for similarities and differences in people’s responses. Most useful for managers leading groups of people from different functional backgrounds. Can be useful at lower levels if the unit is experiencing significant problems. Focus groups Probing issues that preoccupy key groups of employees, such as morale issues among frontline production or service workers. Gathering groups of people who work together also lets you see how they interact and identify who displays leadership. Fostering discussion promotes deeper insight. Most useful for managers of large groups of people who perform a similar function, such as sales managers or plant managers. Can be useful for senior managers as a way of getting quick insights into the perceptions of key employee constituencies. Analysis of critical past decisions Illuminating decision-making patterns and sources of power and influence. Select an important recent decision, and look into how it was made. Who exerted influence at each stage? Talk with the people involved, probe their perceptions, and note what is and is not said. Most useful for higher-level managers of business units or project groups. Process analysis Examining interactions among departments or functions and assessing the efficiency of a process. Select an important process, such as delivery of products to customers or distributors, and assign a cross-functional group to chart the process and identify bottlenecks and problems. Most useful for managers of units or groups in which the work of multiple functional specialties must be integrated. Can be useful for lower-level managers as a way of understanding how their groups fit into larger processes. Plant and market tours Learning firsthand from people close to the product. Plant tours let you meet production personnel informally and listen to their concerns. Meetings with sales and production staff help you assess technical capabilities. Market tours can introduce you to customers, whose comments can reveal problems and opportunities. Most useful for managers of business units. Pilot projects Gaining deep insight into technical capabilities, culture, and politics. Although these insights are not the primary purpose of pilot projects, you can learn a lot from how the organization or group responds to your pilot initiatives. Useful for managers at all levels. The size of the pilot projects and their impact will increase as you rise through the organization.

What makes the Accountability Chart more than just an organizational chart is that once the major functions are clear, each is defined by five major roles. As an example, the visionary function’s five roles might be as follows: • R&D/ideas • Creative problem-solving • Major relationships • Culture • Selling

When you’re finished, the Accountability Chart should look like an organizational chart, with five bullets that illustrate the major roles of each function. Important note: The Accountability Chart will clarify function, role, and reporting structure, but it will not define communication structure. Your communication should flow freely across all lines and departments where necessary, creating an open and honest culture. With each position’s accountability clear and communication crossing all departments, you will avoid cross-departmental issues. The Accountability Chart should in no way create silos or divisions.

Management—or the oversight of people, processes, and production—is just one function of some leaders. Organizations hope their managers will lead, but to be a leader, you need not have a management title because leadership is something else entirely. Leadership is not married to hierarchy, an organizational chart, or formal authority over a team. It’s a different animal, with more depth, breadth, and impact. I’ve known people who were little more than the boss of the applesauce, and yet they proved to be outstanding leaders. And I’ve known some vice presidents, executives, and Grand Poobahs—all with high-powered management titles, and not one of them could lead themselves, or anyone else, around a corner.

The hard thing isn’t setting a big, hairy, audacious goal. The hard thing is laying people off when you miss the big goal. The hard thing isn’t hiring great people. The hard thing is when those “great people” develop a sense of entitlement and start demanding unreasonable things. The hard thing isn’t setting up an organizational chart. The hard thing is getting people to communicate within the organization that you just designed. The hard thing isn’t dreaming big. The hard thing is waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat when the dream turns into a nightmare.

It does something to you when you are running close to what you perceive as our limit (back then, I still topped at 40 percent) and there is someone else out there who makes the difficult look effortless. It was obvious that his preparedness was several levels above our own. Captain Connolly did not show up to simply get through the program and graduate so he could collect some wings for his uniform and belong to the unspoken fraternity of supposed badasses at Fort Campbell. He came to explore what he was made of and grow. That required a willingness to set a new standard wherever possible and make a statement, not necessarily to our dumb asses, but to himself. He was respectful to all the instructors and the school, but he was not there to be led... Most people love standards. It gives the brain something to focus on, which helps us reach a place of achievement. Organizational structure and atta' boys from our instructors or bosses keep us motivated to perform and to move up on that bell curve. Captain Connolly did not require external motivation. He trained to his own standard and used the existing structure for his own purposes. Air Assault School became his own personal octagon, where he could test himself on a level even the instructors hadn't imagined. For the next nine days, he put his head down and quietly went about the business of smashing every single standard at Air Assault School. He saw the bar that the instructors pointed to and the rest of us were trying to tap as a hurdle to leap over, and he did it time and again. He understood that his rank only meant something if he sought out a different certification: an invisible badge that says, "I am the example. Follow me, motherfuckers, and I will show you that there is more to this life than so-called authority and stripes or candy on a uniform. I'll show you what true ambition looks like beyond all the external structure in a place of limitless mental growth." He didn't say any of that. He didn't run his mouth at all. I can't recall him uttering word one in ten fucking days, but through his performance and extreme dedication, he dropped breadcrumbs for anybody who was awake and aware enough to follow him. He flashed his tool kit. He showed us what potent, silent, exemplary leadership looked like. He checked into every Gold Group run, which was led by the fastest instructor in that school, and volunteered to be the first to carry the flag... His conditioning was clearly off the charts, and I'm not talking about the physical aspect alone. Being a physical specimen is one thing, but it takes so much more energy to stay mentally prepared enough to arrive every day at a place like Air Assault School on a mission to dominate. The fact that he was able to do that told me it couldn't possibly have been a one-time thing. It had to be the result of countless lonely hours in the gym, on the trails, and in the books. Most of his work was hidden, but it is within that unseen work that self-leaders are made. I suspect the reason he was capable of exceeding any and all standards consistently was because he was dedicated at a level most people cannot fathom in order to stay ready for any and all opportunities. p237

And surveys are strongly influenced by a customer’s last interaction, good or bad. It’s a point in time, but it really doesn’t tell us if we’ve created an organization that routinely internalizes and prioritizes customer problems to be solved over politics and organizational charts.

Our organizational charts separate employees from customers, our decision-making processes leave employees feeling unempowered, and success becomes navigating the organization as opposed to serving customers. Nearly all companies succumb to varying degrees of this fate as they scale.

Here’s what turns a successful hierarchy into one that impedes progress: when too many people begin, subconsciously, to equate their own value and that of others with where they fall in the pecking order. Thus, they focus their energies on managing upward while treating people beneath them on the organizational chart poorly. The people I have seen do this seem to be acting on animal instinct, unaware of what they are doing. This problem is not caused by hierarchy itself but by individual or cultural delusions associated with hierarchy, chiefly those that assign personal worth based on rank.

Anyone can bark out orders. It doesn’t take strength to yell at people, write them up or blame them for mistakes. It doesn’t take courage to boss people around in private and public when the organizational chart gives them the power to do that. It is the height of cowardice to manage a team with the presumption that they have to listen to you, because of your job title relative to theirs.

There are unique spheres of language that exist in each part of the corporate organizational chart. Inside of each sphere is the language that is unique to the job. Engineers have one, marketing has another, and sales has yet another. In each of these groups, there are the managers who must speak their native language, as well as be able to translate between spheres in order to get the job done. I believe this is a legitimate reason for managementese. It’s the cross-functional language of the company.

Here’s what turns a successful hierarchy into one that impedes progress: when too many people begin, subconsciously, to equate their own value and that of others with where they fall in the pecking order. Thus, they focus their energies on managing upward while treating people beneath them on the organizational chart poorly. The people I have seen do this seem to be acting on animal instinct, unaware of what they are doing.

Ricky asks her, “You lost your earrings in the living room?” She shakes her head. “No, I lost them in the bedroom. But the light out here is much better.” And there it is. Most leaders prefer to look for answers where the light is better, where they are more comfortable. And the light is certainly better in the measurable, objective, and data-driven world of organizational intelligence (the smart side of the equation) than it is in the messier, more unpredictable world of organizational health. Studying spreadsheets and Gantt charts and financial statements is relatively safe and predictable, which most executives prefer. That’s how they’ve been trained, and that’s where they’re comfortable. What they usually want to avoid at all costs are subjective conversations that can easily become emotional and awkward. And organizational health is certainly fraught with the potential for subjective and awkward conversations.

Think of the organizational design as the communications architecture for your company. If you want people to communicate, the best way to accomplish that is to make them report to the same manager. By contrast, the further away people are in the organizational chart, the less they will communicate.

The sort of candidate who might have benefited from such legislation is Boštjan Špetič, a Slovenian citizen, discussed previously. As founder of Zemanta, Špetič had opened his business in New York in 2009 with an L-1A visa, used to transfer a foreign company's top managers. Zemanta had an office in London and Špetič had moved to the USA from there. After a year, however, he was denied a visa renewal. “The US officers said that we didn’t have enough staff in the United States to justify a senior executive position,” recalls Špetič. “They stated that it was obvious from the organizational chart that we didn’t have an office manager, implying that no one was answering phone calls, and that’s why we could not claim a senior executive transfer. Somewhere in my office I still have four pages of explanations. At that point, I called everybody, the American ambassador in Slovenia, the Slovenian ambassador here, the Slovenian foreign ministry. My investor, Fred Wilson, got in touch with a New York senator, but no one could do anything.” Špetič therefore had to work from Ljubljana for the following three months, when a new attorney finally found the right bureaucratic avenue to obtain an L-1B visa, a specialized technology visa. “Personally, I want to move back home eventually,” says Špetič. “I’m not looking to permanently immigrate to the US. I prefer the European lifestyle. Nevertheless, this is absolutely the best place to build a startup, especially in the media space. It made so much sense to build and grow the company here. I never could have done it in Europe, and that is an amazing achievement for New York City.” For this reason, when other European entrepreneurs ask him for advice, Špetič always tells them to settle in New York, at least for a period of time, to gain American experience. And for them he dreams of creating a co-working space modeled after WeWork Labs: “Imagine a place exactly like this, but with decent coffee, wine tasting events in the evening and only non-US business people working in its offices,” explains Špetič. “There is a set of problems that foreigners have that Americans just can’t understand. Visa issues are the most obvious ones. Working-with-remote-teams issues, travel issues, personal issues such as which schools to send your children to… It’s a set of things that is different from what American startups talk about. You don’t need networking events for foreigners because you want people to network into the New York community, but a working environment would make sense because it would be like a safe haven, an extra comfort zone for foreigners with a different work culture.

organizational charts and well-defined legal structures. What is the relationship between the quite traditional nonprofit corporation headquartered in San Francisco and the free, open, multilingual, online, global community of volunteers? Is the "institution" the sustaining organization, the

There are a few reasons. Most pre-call strategy meetings neglect soft skills in their analysis of the opportunity. For example, what is the personality and mindset of the various people in the organizational charts? How do these individuals personally make decisions? What do you need to do or say in order to better relate to each of them? You

Rearranging the boxes in the organizational chart without considering other strategic or operational improvements is not enough to turn around a company or elevate it to the next level of performance. There is no one structure that alone will produce organization perfection. Nor in most cases will appointing a new leader or two to fill new positions be adequate to produce change without also addressing underlying systemic issues, no matter how extraordinary those leaders are.

The other caution has to do with coordinating what work is phased out as a result of lower staffing levels. Leaders often let any such phasing out proceed of its own accord because they have faith that when they eliminate layers in the organizational chart or increase leadership spans of control, people who feel the increased workload will wisely and naturally eliminate tasks that are non-value added or of reduced competitive importance. But this faith is misplaced if employees are not clear about the relative value of work or what the strategic trade-offs should be. If they do not know what work to eliminate, they may not eliminate any at all and instead pass it on to someone else. In this way the organization chart is like a square of jiggly jelly. If you squeeze the jelly from the top and the bottom, it is going to squelch out the sides, and if you squeeze from the sides, it is going to squelch out the top and the bottom. Increasing spans of control—giving leaders more responsibility—may soon result in more layers (for example, one firm created “senior technician” roles for technicians to fill as intermediaries for busy managers). Decreasing layers of the organizational chart may increase spans of control (for example, another company eliminated a layer of managers but then hired a couple of new directors to handle the additional workload when all the reports were reassigned to the next highest management level). The total headcount dollars are never reduced, just reapportioned.

Being a leader doesn’t mean you have people reporting to you on an organizational chart—leadership is about inspiring and motivating those around you.

This explains why, compared with European and Asian companies, American businesses tend to have more: •​Organizational charts (showing on paper who works for whom) •​Titles (describing exactly who is at what level) •​Written objectives (explaining who is responsible for accomplishing what) •​Performance appraisals (stating in writing how each person is doing) By contrast, many high-context cultures—particularly those of Asia and Africa—have a strong oral tradition in which written documentation is considered less necessary. The tendency to put everything in writing, which is a mark of professionalism and transparency in a low-context culture, may suggest to high-context colleagues that you don’t trust them to follow through

Resources required Flip chart paper and pens, virtual whiteboard/platform. A3 cards with the six logical levels (Dilts, 1990) headings printed on them as below (you can also use flip charts or display virtually): Purpose Identity Values and Beliefs Skills and Capabilities Behaviours Environment