The Executive Perspective

Every organization is a system, and as a system it is perfectly designed to produce the results it is producing! Is this true? We have been in front of executives who will disagree with this, at least initially. Often it is because they trip over the fact that it is perfectly designed. As a leader, this can be a hard message to hear, as the buck stops with you!

Can you see that this sometimes is a hard message to deliver to executives? If you are not getting the results that you are looking for, and yet you have been working hard, does that mean that you have been doing it wrong?

Now, let’s look at the good news. The good news is that once you accept this premise, and you see that it is a design, now you can start looking for what it is you can change in your design to significantly improve your results.

As discussed at several topics here on our blog, you design your company system through the conversations that you are actively having as well as those that you have codified in employee manuals, procedures, plans. However, your design is also stuck in unspoken conversations that you should be having but you are not having. The classic example is of a company that wants to be innovative but does not reward risk taking.

Once you recognize that, you can now also see that if you want to change your results, and therefore the design of your team or company, you just have to change your conversations.