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Wednesday, July 7, 2010

The Whole Truth... Making Sense out of Organizational Problems

When things go wrong in organizations, even technical failures, the first reaction of many managers is to find who is at fault. The reasons for organizational breakdowns, however, are less likely found in people and personalities than in systems and structures.


It makes sense to start looking for flaws in individuals; people are the agents of organizational functions afterall. It is a fallacy, however, to reduce analysis of organizational problems to the personality attributes of one or more parties.

To be fair, managerial misperceptions are usually based upon listening to the way in which the people describe their circumstances. The most common explanations I hear for breakdowns in organizational systems are:




• * A personality conflict.

• * A communications breakdown

• * Someone lied.



While there may be some truth to each of these explanations (obviously people are involved) the truth of the matter is that breakdowns in organizational settings are more likely rooted in the setting itself, not the people. The two most over-looked explanations of why things go wrong are organizational structure/systems and organizational culture.

The way in which organizations structure how decisions are made, implemented and communicated and the cultural values that guide how those decisions are many times a better explanation of what has gone wrong than the deficiencies of any one person or a group.

Of course, individuals and the personality traits of people surely color the way in which these problems are expressed, but the “spin they put on the ball” should not distract from the fact that the ball was already in flight. Good analysis looks beyond the individual and seeks the source of the problem deeper in the organization itself.

Here’s an example. . Sally is a division manager; George is a human relations specialist and they routinely struggle over policy issues. He sees her as a “loose cannon;” she sees him as a “tyrannical bureaucrat.” Their public discussions and private communication are increasingly acrimonious, to the point that their supervisor, after repeated efforts to get them to work together, calls me.

Their boss tells me there is a “personality conflict” between two of her key managers and I’m asked to fix it. Sure enough, I interview everyone and the accounts are pretty much the same. Sally lists all of George’s undesirable traits and writes him off as “impossible to work with.” I hear the same story about Sally from George and he tells me “I can’t work with her anymore.”


There's plenty of data to point to a personality conflict, but now is the time to look beyond the personal aspects of the conflict. The personalities are relevant, but not central to the explanation of what’s gone wrong here. There is value in interpreting their conflict to be a symptom of something wrong in the organization itself, either a systematic problem or a conflict in cultural values.

Turns out the problem with Sally and George really had to do with the roles they were assigned. Sally really objected to having to get many of her decisions approved by George who was neither her superior nor in her reporting line. In carrying out the responsibilities of his role, George was perceived (correctly) by Sally as a road-block and a time-sink that got in the way of her trying to carry out the responsibilities of her role (which led George to see Sally [correctly] as pushy, impatient and disrespectful). And, of course, the more Sally objected to George’s “interference,” the more he felt disrespected by Sally and the more difficult it became for her to get assistance from him.

That’s just an example, but I hear them every day. If it isn’t a dispute about roles and responsibilities it’s a conflict over contrary values bred within the same organization. I could have taken the same example and shown how it exemplified the values of productivity and efficiency held by the operational manager, Sally, and the values of policy and rules held by an HR staffer, George. I’ll use another blog post at a later date to describe the conflict inherent in any social enterprise as operational, managerial and technical values collide (it ain’t pretty).

Ok, so what is the truth? It’s there, but you have to work to figure it out. Just keep in mind: everyone’s position in an organization allows for a unique, but distorted view of the truth. To solve organizational problems you need to learn how to combine these various accounts and come to a sense of what may be true. In fact, understanding the source and nature of the distortions may explain much about why people think and act as they do. While it’s tempting to see problems as tied to the personalities of the people involved, quite often the root causes are to be found in the structure, systems and cultural values of the organization itself.

This is part of a more extended discussion on truth, honesty and lying in general.  If interested check out this blogpost: 

http://dukeonline.blogspot.com/2010/06/getting-to-truth-of-matter-honesty-and.html