During our first conversation, Henry, the CEO of a technology company, expressed frustration over his organization’s inability to stay focused on and execute priorities. “We agree upon priorities at the beginning of each quarter,” he said, “but when it comes time to review them, I’m told that urgent crises have prevented us from making progress. We never get anything done.”
4 Organizational Design Issues That Most Leaders Misdiagnose
Your problem probably isn’t what you think it is.
December 06, 2019
HBR Staff/Pexels
Summary.
Competent leaders misdiagnose organizational problems all the time. This is largely because recurring performance challenges run deeper than they initially appear. More often, they are symptoms of a larger problem rooted in organization design. Four of the most common problems that arise as a result of this are: competing priorities (caused by poor governance), unwanted turnover (caused by bad role design), inaccessible bosses (caused by excessive spans of control), and cross functional rivalry (caused by misaligned incentives and/or metrics).