"Six Principles for Designing the Accountable Organization"
Journal of Organizational Excellence
Autumn 2004, pp. 59-66
The authors of this article identify six principles of job and organization design that they feel should "underpin any performance improvement effort, whether the focus is organization as a whole or specific functions and work groups."
The principles are:
- A ruthless focus on value—The important factors here are the identification of functions required to implement the company's strategy, the most effective structure for achieving the strategy, requirements that are translated into job accountabilities that connect to the larger strategy, and care to see that each job and management layer efficiently adds value.
- Crystal clear interdependencies—The key steps here are to eliminate redundancies and gaps in accountabilities, and to ensure the clarity of roles across all processes and functions.
- Doable roles—The key elements here are that jobs should be designed around requirements, the size and shape of jobs (the skills, experience, problem solving, and decision making the jobs require) should match the accountabilities assigned to it, there should be an appropriate number of accountabilities, and there should be a balance of job requirements and motives.
- Empowerment requires specific freedom to act—"Clarity of decision-making authority by individuals and by those who interact with them is absolutely critical for organizations to get things done without friction."
- Clear definitions of concurrent accountabilities and tiebreakers—Interdependencies must be explicit, and there should be a clear system for how decisions will be made if those who share interdependency do not agree.
- Teams are also held accountable—"the most effective teams are those in which there is absolute clarity of accountability and clear value-added regarding the team's role and the expected contribution from each member."
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