For a leader’s job to begin, there must be an identity defined. Only with the three organisational elements well built, a modern leader can do his or her job, which is to activate and engage members into creating results. But, as your may recall, there is another phase between planning, where identity gets defined, and leading. That one is a phase of organising.
From the beginning
I’ve already mentioned a term organisation for several times. In those cases meaning “a group of people working towards a common goal”. In frame of this meaning an organisation is any given company, or an educational, healthcare, public administration, sport, cultural, or other entity. But this time meaning is different. Now we are talking about a certain characteristic that those entities have. But let’s just start at the very beginning.
We are probably all familiar with an expression “to be organised” or “being organised”. With a very solid proximity, we can say this is about “being in order” or “orderliness”. And also in terms of performing an organising role in an organisation, we will talk about establishing some order. Let’s just move on to see what it means when this characteristic is describing a social group.
Next point of stoppage is a distinction between an organisation and a group. Organisation is a group of people that necessarily works towards a common goal. It can be a group of teachers, a headmaster and all other staff who together realise goals of a given educational institution. An organisation is also a group of individuals who make and sell furniture made of wood, or who put products on the shelves of a supermarket that customers can then buy.
If we are talking about a group, we can use this word to refer to 30 selected visitors at a concert of a popular musician, or to 30 students laying around in the university campus park. Members of a group don’t need a common goal, they can be there for various different reasons and purposes, and may just randomly have come together.
Organisational structure
With a group-organisation distinction in mind, in latter there are more rules and therefore more order in place. Even if we take something as ordinary as communication, in an organisation there will be some obligatory communicating to do or some obligatory messages to deliver. Being said in a wider sense, organisation has a certain defining characteristic. It has a structure.
Imagine that before your eyes there is a group of people. You can see their faces, their grimaces and gesticulations, and you can listen to their talks. Topics they talk about range from politics, sports, to talks about a trip or a date from last night. Now imagine this group wants to earn 1000 units of money. What will you do? You will probably want to assign responsibilities. You will oblige some with certain working tasks, others with task to acquire certain information this group will need to realise that goal, etc. Well, what we are doing here is establishing a structure. And this structure is set towards attaining a certain goal, so it is not random, but rather deliberately designed.
There is one final thing I want to add about an organisational structure. That is: it has four layers. We’ve already mentioned communication. An order established will demand some information being transferred from one member to another. Some information will be allowed to be delivered verbally, some by mail, but some may need a form of a very formal written report. A communication layer defines all needed rules regarding informational flows.
Remaining three are a technical layer that defines working tasks for every member and determines what sort of products and semi-products have to be handed from one member to another, a responsibility or motivation layer that defines what will be a responsibility for a certain member or what sort of value each person has to deliver to the group, and last one is a power or authority layer that defines what any certain member will be able and be allowed to decide about.
Two basic types of organisational design
So, an organisation is a group of people that has some order put in place in this order is established by an organisational structure. This structure is deliberately designed to lead a group towards achieving a common goal. And in a designing process we need to define roles in range of four layers: technical, communicational, in a responsibility and in an authority layer. And the final piece of information? This organisational design can be done with two general and opposing goals in mind: efficiency and successfulness.
A mechanistic organisation for efficiency
When industrialisation took hold in the world, manufacturing companies were able to produce a significantly larger number of products than before. As a result, product prices fell significantly and demand for them increased. Henry Ford, in his company of the same name, wanted to do the same with cars: to make many more of them, to sell them at a lower price and, of course, to reach a much larger mass of people than before.
To achieve this, every job had to be done quickly and correctly; without unnecessary corrections causing delays and distracting the next person in the queue. Decisions were designed to be made by someone who had a view of the whole production. Since decision-making was concentrated at the top, decisions already made just had to be introduced to others. Communication channels therefore were mostly filled with orders. The methods, the procedures, and simply all aspects of the work were clearly defined, as this was the only way to achieve the desired speed and regularity in production.
Thus emerged an order that very strictly defined all the rules for conduct in working environment. In it, a group of people needs to act as “a well-oiled machine”. There are many strict rules and everyone needs to behave according to those predetermined procedures, which leaves very little space to any personal decisions, that would only impede the well thought-out process.
We call this a mechanistic organisation.
An organic organisation for successfulness
Mechanistic organisations are good when we want to be efficient, meaning “doing things in a right way”, with low time consumption and other costs. But there is another crucial metric to organisational performance, namely “doing the right things” or successfulness. In points more to an ability to be flexible and to be able to tailor your response to a given challenge.
We are now moving to an opposite pole and an opposite type of a defined organisation. When a group is guided by this mindset, it tends to only set a few basic rules. Because it wants to leave space for reacting to specific challenges, procedures are not strictly determined, but rather left at least partially open.
Such a working environment is designed very differently. Leaders want decisions to be made by those members that are in those given working situations. They want them to respond as best as they can, so communication channels are not filled with orders, but rather with information that would facilitate their decision making process and make it as good as it can be. I believe that you can see that all layers of organisational structure are therefore designed much differently.
We call this an organic organisation.
Conclusion
Organisation is the last big organisational element that a leader needs to do his or her work. That is, to be able to function as a modern leader and to create a modern working environment for the followers.
For a group of people to work together well, they need some order to be put in place. Yet, order doesn’t need to mean strict rules, but mostly a way of doing, that is shared, well understood and accepted by all members, and that enables us to be as efficient and successful as we need to be to realise our goal and to fulfil our purpose.
Paradim 