Is your organization too flat?
By Thomas Day
I recently read an entry in Paul Levy’s blog, titled “Is your organization too flat?” A pretty good question, and so I read it with interest. The various entries were a disappointment, actually, starting with one post suggesting that BP’s recent reorganization – which reduced their 11 layers to 7 – was suicidal, and then intimated that the recent deep-water explosion was the result. (IMO: 11 layers is ridiculous, and I sure wouldn’t leap to that conclusion).
Another post noted Toyota’s supervisory structures were notoriously heavy, and that’s good given their history of quality – except their recent troubles, which he suggests are not related. And the consensus, which makes perfect sense, was that form must follow function, so different types of decisions made in different departments call for different structures, and so on. The part that was troubling was that all of this was made to sound very complicated – almost mystical, and certainly unknowable without deep insight (and perhaps a mantra or two). Commentators turned phrases such as flat may be more “efficient, but is it more effective?” Here’s the link so you can read it for yourself.
My own posted response follows:
I doubt that anyone is honestly advocating that BP’s 11 layers of management seems like it might have been the right thing, and moving away from such a structure required a great deal of study to sort out. And I also suspect that no one really thinks that removing front-line supervisors is flattening an organization, or, finally, that hospital work is so varied and complex that these things don’t have “boundaries” of reasonableness.
These questions can be made to seem so complex so as to paralyze common-sense approaches. My apologies in advance if I’ve read the above comments too harshly. But to imagine that layers of assistant department heads reporting to department heads reporting to assistant vice presidents reporting to vice presidents reporting to etc. may provide organizational flexibility, and that it requires study to sort out, doesn’t make sense to me. It seems obviously wrong, just as red is not green.
In a hospital setting, structures get calcified over time – especially when (non-acquired) FTE growth won’t accommodate career/responsibility growth. Thus promotions to really good people serve as rewards for a job well done – guaranteeing structures get complex and layered over time.
It’s pretty easy to measure where structures are not commonsensical and it’s also pretty easy to measure where front-line supervision is starved. And of course different types of work require different structures. Call me Shallow Hal if you’d like, but a great first step is to find these areas and clear them out.
