Establishing Organizational Rhythm: Finding Alignment with People and Work

Planning your work, working your plan

Organizational | Design, Structure, Discipline, Culture, Development, Effectiveness, Change….all things we do or follow as leaders and managers, and much of the time we don’t even actively think about them or label them. We’re on cruise control, at least those with more experience in leadership, and we tend to get things set-up, have some regular change, otherwise we have a lot of firefighting, customer attention aspects, and supporting internal/external priorities. For those newer in leadership positions or that have been at it for sometime, we can use a good pulse check on ourselves - are we proactively driving the business, or is the business driving us?

Planning our work

This isn’t referring to how you track action items or to do’s, rather the approach to your actual work - the business your group or company executes on to serve its internal or external customer, while driving service and profitability. The approach to how you look at the following:

• Work to be done

• Resource allocation

• Investment

• People, process, and technology

• Where you are today, compared to where you want to go

• How do you get there from a work perspective

• Quality product or service

• Continuous improvement

• Operational process control

• Performance management

• Profitability

In a sense, I’m talking about how you’re going to operate, how you want to approach this job or this business, all focused on building an organization to grow opportunity for your people and stakeholders.

Failing to plan, is planning to fail

Yes, when you create a plan, a lot of it will change during the course of day-to-day business, but have you seen work without any plan at all? Exactly. You can wing it for awhile, but if you haven’t yet, you will likely find that building even a high level plan, and iterating along the way is a better way for operation. And before you get into the debate of your location of work, meaning where your team actually sits to get the work done, consider planning your work to support your vision. Work location is a byproduct of the work and needs of the business. We’re not talking about mission or vision statements either, we’re talking about our approach to the actual work. Your plan to getting the work done and advancing the work is so important to support the vision which encourages much needed innovation.

Having a vision is great, but if you’re ultimately going to let the business run you from there, your vision is a myth. It’s a hope, not a vision. If you have a vision, it’s best to structure work to support it, which means having a strategy to achieve that vision, and some kind of tactical plan to support your overarching strategy. Your plan is what will drive how you structure your organization’s work. We often jump in and just want to work, we don’t want to slow down and plot out how we want to work, and truly consider what the work is meant to achieve. Others plan and don’t want to do the work out of fear; too much planning isn’t helpful either. Moving with urgency is important, but urgent work and action haphazardly focused, shouldn’t mean, rushed building or aimlessly productive cycles. Rushed without proper consideration equals a mess of a business driving in all the wrong directions.

The view from 50,000 feet

It can be helpful when building from scratch or transforming your current operation to step back and consider:

• How your business supports your customer

• How your business develops current customers and new business

• How your business is sustainable and profitable

• How it fights fires

• How it promotes simplicity and collaboration

• How it supports your vision

• How does the market perceive your business compared to the competition

Step back and take a look at your organization at the 50,000 foot level and consider, how does your current mode of operation really promote your vision. A lot of clarity comes from alignment, and in this case, alignment with vision and organizational dynamics. An article published by IGI, touches on organizational discipline. “Organizational discipline is the practice of self-restraint and learning to follow the best course of action which may not be according to one’s desire. Discipline is important as it binds the employees and also motivates them to respect their organization.”

This takes me to discipline over motivation and which one is more sustainable, with discipline being the logical answer. Motivation can come and go, but if you can build your discipline muscle, you can have sustainable operations, and organizations act similarly to people. Discipline wins, because it sustains over time, versus running on motivation which can come and go.

The main thing is the work

Often in business the actual work gets pushed aside. Sounds funny, but when you think about it, how often do people in the company spend time on actually getting the work done. And how many jobs are actually focused on productive quality work. And then on the other side, we spend a lot of time putting out fires for customers, and fires for employees. Spending a lot of time in the current course of business is important for certain roles and levels, but not everything is urgent and important. It takes management maturity to learn the difference.

The reality is that companies and many of its people often don’t spend a lot of time on what we’re actually trying to accomplish. If organizations and individuals even spent 70-80% of their time, actually working on trying to accomplish designing that thing, and building that thing, thinking of what the next thing is, or collaborating to solve problems, we would make a lot more progress in a lot less time. That’s the advantage entrepreneurial organizations often have as smaller to medium sized business is more nimble and intentional. This is where large corporate orgs must fight through the noise, and organizations with clarity have the ease to actually focus on the work.

Put work into action

The smaller the entity, the more chance for success that capitalizes on swift changes to the market, product, demands of your customer, and strengths of your talent. Large orders, large responsibility, larger groups for communication, the harder it is to actually drive action that is driving business results, performance, profitability, and growth from action. I don’t have a study the back this up, but as you look at your business, it may become quite clear, your segmentation and specialization, just like marketing segmentation, similar to technical engineering skill sets, become critical. You don’t have a doctor caring for your car. You don’t have a plumber putting on your roof. Specialists with action drives results, performance, and profitability so we need to prioritize action. Having a mindset similar to what I heard from Alex Hormozi “think end of day, not end of week”. Want to accelerate your business and have an action-oriented mindset, then shift the parallel to end of day, not end of week. We’re here to get things done now, so it should be done now. It does not mean to launch large projects and move around priorities unnecessarily, but that means if it needs to be done, just get it done. Is that a simplified approach, probably. But, I believe in business we need more action, and we need more simple.

Action based on ownership

There is a shifting tide with the conversation, whether you’re an upper-level executive, your mid-level exec, or as supervisors and managers, we need to change the narrative. It’s time to shift from thank you for bringing up that problem, thank you for bringing up that error or challenge, to thank you for addressing the gaps and profitability, margins, and revenue. Prioritize action, empowerment in action. Action with an ownership mindset drives business results - not talk, not strategies, not even the mission or vision. Your mission and values help enable and guide action, your strategy and planning help you have a path, but they don’t do it for you. Change the culture, and shift your company and leadership mindset to a center of action-oriented purpose.

Again, is it simple, yes, easy, no. If it were easy, you would have Fortune 500 companies making decisions in an instant. You wouldn’t have months or quarters to make decisions on simple, or fundamental concepts or questions, but you would have weeks, days, moments in some circumstances. Faster decisions, drive faster actions. And faster action drives faster results. Because performance and results are what we’re here to execute on what our stakeholders expect, it’s time to align our people priorities with our results priorities, and our results with profitability.

Does this mean less people to get the job done in some circumstances, it can. But your ability to repurpose and reassign labor to revenue generating activities will allow for your growth goals. Getting more done with less people, can transition to getting more done with those same people, and that’s where the game changes for labor allocation. Don’t think of your people as an expendable resource, but instead as a valued partner, an investment in your business, and solid foundation of your company, an essential to growth and getting the work done. If you need work done, don’t reduce your high-performing people, but instead identify how to make them profitable through their work.

Value people and culture

We tend to glamorize and hype thousands of hiring numbers in the thousands, and in a lot of ways, we glamorize thousands of people being let go. It’s news, drama, it’s what sells. We don’t seem to spend as much time putting focus on actual profitable growth as a net income either. Small and medium sized businesses are here to make margins, not build empires, and somewhere along the line, that got a little foggy for some organizations.

Planning and structuring your work, forces your introspection on what’s important to an organization’s growth and what is the underlying fuel that isn’t cash, equipment, or ideas. It’s the people, and culture, from leadership through those sweeping the floor. I heard someone reference that culture is overrated, and too touchy feely. They mentioned they would “take a winning team over culture”, with all due respect, guess what, the behaviors, mindset, teamwork, that is part of what makes up your culture. Your culture may be a performance based culture, or a winning culture, whatever it may be. That just shows how much some great business leaders miss describing their methods, culture, and still see the people side as the woo-woo stuff. I would venture to guess that not all, but there is a strong commonality seen in organizations that have great results, strong market reputation, solid people retention and NPS scores - they also have a strong performance operations culture and some just don’t know it. They can’t effectively describe it or feel something tangible they can articulate. In some cases, that means you have a strong culture, in others maybe the “lack of a culture” you think you have, is a reflection on a poor organizational culture.

It’s a critical mistake to throw organizational culture in within the context of a perceived “soft” aspect of society that some may have. Ignore culture and you ignore long term sustainability of your team and results, you ignore your clients, and your employees, effectively ignoring your business.

Build the organization of the future, weaving culture as the underlying connective tissue that grows your leadership confidence and organizational intelligence regarding people, but also grows your business.

Side Note

If you’re interested in reading more about a legendary business mind that serves as an inspiration for some of the thoughts and business concepts I share in OpCo, and even Warren Buffett learns from and molds much of his mindset from, check out Henry Singleton. The Founders podcast covers it well.

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