3 Reasons to Reimagine the Org Chart
Org charts are a lie. It looks like a neat order of people and what they’re in charge for. But in reality, people are influencing and asserting power across the pyramid.
Think about it, how do you get things in your organization? Rigid hierarchies and toxic office politics slow organizations down massively.
So what’s the alternative? Abolish the hierarchy?
Flat hierarchies can be equally slow if not worse. When we get rid of a formal hierarchy, the informal hierarchy takes on new and different forms. We’re evolutionarily wired for hierarchy and order. It’s important to lean into that wiring, rather than try and get rid of it.
What we need is to move from a hierarchy of people to a hierarchy of purpose.
Instead of centering power around individuals, we can center power around a specific purpose that a team of people is tasked with.
Here’s why that works:
For one, when you remove the focus from individuals and shift it towards the actual purpose of the team, you can be more objective in your decision making. The question is no longer about what this person thinks or how we rally them, but rather about whether a decision moves the purpose forward or back. I see this in organizations all the time, there are obvious things that need to happen but leaders hold back because it might offend the person leading the team or division.
Secondly, by shifting focus from an individual to a team, you are empowering multiple people to hold and steward something important. And remember, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We are no longer in a world where one smart person holds all the answers. We need to come together and grapple with complex challenges to find the right solutions.
Finally, when you move the emphasis away from an individual’s power, you unlock an enormous amount of flexibility. You can actually assess the importance of a specific purpose at a point in time, and you can change and evolve the scale and size of that in an ongoing way. The reality is, we need to continually be scaling teams up and down, putting more and less resource behind things at different times. To actually meet complex challenges, we need flexibility. When a person’s ego isn’t front and center, we have a lot more power to be flexible.
It’s time to reimagine the organizational hierarchy, and the starting point is to move purpose to the center and prioritize a hierarchy of purpose over a hierarchy of people.
