Will your new plan let your company fly to the stars – or crash on take-off?

By LUCIA MABASA

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail the saying goes – and it’s the same with organisational design, developing and mapping structures, roles and processes, hierarchies and work flows to enhance your company’s goals.

Not every plan you design will work, because there might be fatal flaws baked into its DNA. The success of organisational designs, like any other plan, depends on the real will of those who wanted it in the first place and it requires the true commitment of the person chosen to be the architect of the plan.

It’s vital to start the process with the reason for doing it. Why are you engaging on this process and what do you hope to achieve? Setting this out up front allows everyone to be kept honest, whether it is the board that greenlit the process or the person who was given the task of drawing up the structure.

The best plans are ones that have been drawn up with proper consultation of the people who will be required to implement them, this means that cut and paste plans from other organisations are almost always doomed to failure. This is because every company or organisation is different, from their histories to their markets and even their staff.

It is also why buy in from staff is so vital. Apart from the fact that they are the ones who must make the plan work, they are also an incredible repository of knowledge – they will know if something that you are suggesting will work or if it won’t, because they might have tried to do it before and failed.

Getting the support of the staff allows them to feel ownership in the plan and they will go the extra mile to make sure it does work, rather than just paying lip service or even giving it up when they hit a road block.

Companies that have instituted new organisational designs and have reaped the rewards of that plan, whether in terms of profitability, growth or even product and service diversification all share the same attribute – they did it by prioritising employee engagement.

The other critical indicator of success is the ability to fail fast and adapt. Sometimes it takes so long between getting the approval to start an organisational design, prototyping it and then presenting it that the market that it was supposed to capture or the rationale it was supposed to address has either moved on or no longer exists.

It takes a brave and ethical leader to go back to the board and admit this, especially since a huge investment would have been made by this stage. There is nothing worse than being dogmatic for the sake of pride and embarking on a course that could potentially ruin the business.

It’s the same principle that should guide the creation of the new design. It should never be top down and it should never be over complicated. To succeed it must be believed in and understandable by everyone. Most importantly the assumptions that underpinned the original idea to bring about this change must be tested at every level.

Once again, the first question that should have been asked remains the true north – why? Why is this new organisational design being undertaken? If it is cost-cutting then expecting anything else – especially a heightened staff morale and greater productivity is almost certainly an expensive delusion.

Likewise, innovation for the sake of innovation and the adoption of every shiny new technological advance are no guarantees of success – on the contrary they display a muddled purpose and in that, the seed of future corporate disaster. Instituting change for the sake of change – or because all the other companies that you know are doing it, is also a disaster waiting to happen.

And yet, when the “why” is known, is tested and is proven and when the plan is properly conceived and implemented then the seeds of success have been properly sown. The corporate history books are full of both; the incredible courage of visionary and inspirational leaders who made their companies into household names – and the graveyard of those who failed appallingly.

It's important that you decide which one you want to be and set the price you are prepared to pay to succeed – because the price of failure can be very steep indeed.

*Lucia Mabasa is Chief Executive Officer of pinpoint one human resources, a proudly South African black women owned executive search firm. pinpoint one human resources provides executive search solutions in the demand for C suite, specialist and critical skills across industries and functional disciplines, in South Africa and across Africa. Visit www.pinpointone.co.za to find out more or read her previous columns on leadership; avoiding the pitfalls of the boardroom and becoming the best C-suite executive you can be.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.