I offer outside help to develop your organisation.  I do sometimes wonder whether organisations need my help at all?!

I attended a rather excellent sales masterclass recently.  Among other things, we discussed the emotional reasons people buy our services.  People buy things for one of three reasons: pleasure, fear or pain.

My wife just bought a Kindle Fire.  She’s delighted with it.  She bought it for pleasure, and to stop her playing games on her work laptop.  She can now switch that off and play Sim City or whatever with impunity.  With discipline, I’m sure she could have kept her existing arrangement, but hey!  What do I know about work-life balance?

A friend of mine recently bought a new child car seat, fuelled by the fear that her existing restraint is not good enough to protect her toddler, given new laws came in from March 1.  I’m curious why the existing restraint was perfectly okay in February (even under the new legislation), but is no longer good enough?  But hey, what do I know about wellbeing?

I realised on the masterclass (if I didn’t already know) that I am in the business of selling organisational pain relief!  But are organisations in pain?

How are you experiencing organisational pain?

I’ve developed this short questionnaire to help you assess the level of your organisational pain.  I suspect you’re in pretty good shape, but here goes… give yourself one point for each statement that is true.

1. Our corporate strategy is fully embedded into the way we operate
2. Our local business plans are all completely aligned to the overall corporate plan
3. Our customers all find it easy to do business with us
4. Our people are completely engaged in the vision and live our values day-to-day
5. There is no silo-mentality here – people work well together across organisational boundaries
6. The last organisational restructure we did is totally embedded and working like a dream
7. All our managers take full accountability for their team’s performance
8. In fact, we don’t have managers, we have leaders
9. We have a “right first time” customer-focused culture
10. We all support and challenge each other to role model the right behaviours

Scoring

8-10 points

Well done, you have achieved significant organisational alignment.  I told you that you didn’t need any outside help, didn’t I?

4-7 points

Not bad.  Any slight organisational pain you might be feeling will probably go away on its own.  Keep doing the things you’re doing, things are bound to improve soon.

0-3 points

Never mind.  You’ve got used to working like this.  I guess things will always be this way.  You probably do not have any budget to invest in organisational development anyway, right?

 

But hey, what do I know about organisational development?

 

Jeremy J Lewis

The Organisational Fool

April 1, 2017 😉