Controlling Teams and Organizations

When we talk with clients about the Internetworked organizational model, the most common question asked is how control is exercised in highly interactive and less formal organizations. This month we will look at control in Chain of Command organizations as a basis for discussing control in Internetworked organizations in a future issue.

The four bases of control are structure, strategies, systems, and society.

Control via Structure

The structure of an organization is the basis of traditional control. This includes having the right people in the right positions with the right partitioning of responsibilities and accountabilities and a compensation system aligned to those structures.

It is unfortunate that in many of the traditional organizations that I see, those elements are far from clear – much of the work I have done as a consultant involves working with clients to clarify roles and responsibilities that are muddy despite organizational definitions.

These structural challenges show in places such as emails with long ‘TO’ lists - too long because the sender is unclear to whom the action belongs. It also shows up in power struggles as two leaders argue actively or passively about control of operation or direction of the business. Or worse, it’s just plain confusion that leads to ‘dropped balls’, outages, or unpredictable program execution.

Control via Strategies

Many leaders understand that they cannot control all of the actions of their organization and so they supplement the specifics of projects with ‘the big picture’ to insure that people understand how the organization will grow and evolve into the future. These clarifications of mission, future products, market segments and customer profiles are all helpful to insure that organizational momentum is directed at the desired future.

But this takes time. First, time is needed for building effective strategies as the business leaders scramble to meet the day-to-day demands of the monthly financial plan and other business commitments. Second, the strategies require frequent updates due to rapidly changing competition and market conditions – not just an annual update. These two factors alone make this a challenging task… even before the difficulty of building effective strategies are taken into account.

One of my stock interview questions when surveying a team is to ask individual contributors about the businesses strategies, goals and future plans. Few can answer beyond their current project and many teams are unsettled by not knowing even the generalities of their future assignments.

Control via Systems

Systems, processes, and work standards are usually the formal basis of planning, budgeting, and controlling a business. Many of these are instantiated in computer systems that control the workflow and insure that everyone follows the processes. Others are defined in company-wide procedures that define the details of execution of projects, programs, manufacturing, sales, account development and many others parts of the business.

But many of these, particularly in non-repetitive work, are chronically out of date, cumbersome, not applicable to global projects, pre-internet, or just written for another time in business. I have seen many that are self serving – that is, the process becomes the deliverable instead of the product that the customer wants.

Many systems are so antiquated that the stars of the organization succeed by working around processes. Businesses struggle to change - to look newer, be more responsive and more agile so that they can do a better job in meeting customer’s needs. Much of this problem is affordability. The cost of developing, maintaining, training, and complying with these systems is often not part of the corporate budget. This leads to a cycle of decline that takes the process to being ignored, or at least creatively interpreted so that people can simply do as they believe best in spite of the process.

Control via Society

Companies strive to build the ‘right’ culture to allow the business to work in an optimal manner, to insure cooperation of the employees, achieve smoothly run projects, and provide predictable response to customer and business events.

Culture is a moving target. A couple of weeks ago, I spoke with a project manager who has team members in six countries that span the world – and no team members in his local time zone. His team was completely distributed and their daily working together virtual. In addition to working in multiple time zones, the differing local cultures add layers of complexity. The varying degrees of English proficiency make communication quite challenging.

In the 24/7 working world, there is no opportunity to have unified culture or values. One can accommodate the various cultures, leverage the differences by placing work in locations which have cultures best suited for it – or as many companies do, try to press their home-office culture on the world. This leads to frustration, greatly increased overhead and project management costs, passive resistance to the home office, and in too many cases, eventually leads to less than expected success of the offshore initiative.

Where Next?

Using structure, strategies, systems and society to control an organization are artifacts of the chain of command organization of the past. These still have a place, but that place is challenged as their traditional effectiveness has been set aside by the reality of newer and higher performance Internetworked teams.

Look for an upcoming column on control in Internetworked teams – how to take traditional control concepts and re-craft them to the reality of today’s high performance virtual, radical, or agile teams.
 

Home | Privacy