An eye for (organizational) mismatches
The concealed reasons for mysterious pockets of underperformance and dysfunction, and how to reveal them
Most people are familiar with the dictum ‘Don’t assume, for it makes an ass of u and me’. For all its naive simplicity, it does contain a fundamental truth, but we cannot really function without making assumptions. It is just not possible to verify everything before we make a decision or take an action.
And many of our assumptions work out pretty well. We assume our job today will be pretty much the same as it was yesterday — and that is generally the case. We assume the people who were our colleagues yesterday will still be our colleagues today. That too is generally true.
But some assumptions are more disputable, yet we hang on to them as a matter of course. It doesn’t occur to us to question them, and we take no deliberate action to verify whether they are indeed correct. Some of those assumptions concern the reciprocal working relationships we have with our colleagues, and that is where sometimes sources of dysfunction may lurk. Not the kind of glaring dysfunction of personality clashes or sabotage, but an invisible kind that does its damage in small ways, under the radar.
A considerable part of the activity within an organization happens along one-on-one relationships between two people, or between two teams or departments. Jane relies on Joe for certain aspects of her job, and Joe needs input from Jane to do his. Department X can make department Y’s life heaven or hell, and vice versa.
It would be ideal if such relationships were evenly balanced — in simple terms: if the working relationship between Jane and Joe would be as important to Jane as it is to Joe. But that kind of perfect symmetry is not the norm in the real world, and that is understandable. In all likelihood the HR business partner can influence what goes on in the R&D club much more than the R&D manager impacts the job of the HR team, for example.
The asymmetry is also not necessarily a problem — at least provided it is known and recognized. The unspoken default perception in organizations is that everyone is equal. That is of course a good thing, but it doesn’t mean that within a working relationship there is perfect symmetry. Imagine Jane and Joe see each other as equals (as they should). That might mean Joe does not realize how much more important their relationship is to Jane’s job than it is to his job. If we have that kind of mismatch, Jane’s expectations from him may remain unmet.
We implicitly allocate our time and our attention — our personal scarce resources — according to what we think is important. But in an organization, what we do is often also important for our colleagues. If we don’t know how important it is for them, how can we make that allocation correctly? How can we make sure we get the balance right?
One thing we can do is to bring the asymmetries in reciprocal relationships to the surface. Helping people (or teams, or even whole departments) discover how much more important, or how much less important they are than their counterparts can help pinpoint underlying organizational tensions.
The importance of the relationship
Let’s look at some real results of this exercise, in a typical organization, doing adequately, but with some performance issues that were hard to pinpoint. When we asked each member of the extended management team (about 35 people) how important their working relationship with each of their colleagues was, what dysfunction did they reveal?
We found that, on a scale of 0–10, people rated the importance of most of their working relationships 4 or higher. Typically about 15% were rated 3 or below. But it is the difference in perception between the two sides of a reciprocal working relationship that offers the most interesting insight.
To what extent did two people have the same view of how important the working relationship between them is? In two-thirds of the cases, the difference in importance was 2 or less — nothing to worry about. But for nearly a quarter, the difference was 3 or 4, and for more than one-in-ten it was 5 or higher. So there was substantial asymmetry in one-third of the reciprocal relationships.
This would not matter much if the relationships in question were the least important ones. But we also found that more than 75% of those asymmetric relationships were considered important or very important (scored at least 7) by at least one of the team members.
It is not hard to see how such asymmetry can be the cause of ineffectiveness. Mismatched business priorities or simply a lack of attention of one person for the other can easily lead to suboptimal decisions, or to delays or lower quality outcomes.
Unknown unknowns
But there is a further potential kind of asymmetry that can cause dysfunction. Let’s ask Jane how well she believes Joe understands her needs, and let’s ask Joe how well he believes he understands Jane’s needs. If Joe is convinced that he is well aware of what Jane expects from him, but Jane’s view is that Joe really doesn’t understand what she requires, we may have a problem.
And that is precisely what we found in a considerable number of working relationships, after asking the team members these two questions.
The difference was small for about 70% of them (shown in green in the diagram), but for 1 in 5 it was quite high (3 or 4), and for more than 1 in 10 it was 5 or more. That is really the equivalent of “Do you really think you know my needs? Think again!”.
And here too, the problem was not concentrated in the least important relationships. Two-thirds of the relationships where the difference was 5 or more were considered important or very important (“importance” score = 7 or more).
So, there was significant misperception about how well people know their colleagues’ needs. It’s one thing not to know — as long as you’re aware that you don’t know, you can take steps to learn. It’s quite another thing not to know that you don’t know.
A sense of perspective
We need to maintain a sense of perspective, though. This organization was functioning pretty well, and we didn’t discover a huge number of alarmingly ineffective relationships .
But between 5% and 7% of all the relationships were worrisome, either because of their unrecognized asymmetry, or because of a poor mutual understanding… and these were important relationships. This is not enough to make the whole organization topple over, but it is enough to be responsible for niggling and intractable cases of poor performance, missed targets or mysterious productivity gaps.
Could a job analysis help discover this type of nuance? Probably not. It helps pinpoint the competencies needed for a position, and focuses on the knowledge, skills, and abilities of an individual as opposed to more subtle interpersonal dynamics that evolve over time.
So this kind of analysis is necessary, but it is only the first step of course, and we should be careful not to get carried away with the figures. The purpose of the analysis is to highlight the differences. Its true value comes from how people engage which their newly found insights to address the dysfunctional asymmetries.
When you bring this kind of input to a team workshop, the reaction is usually a sight to behold: alongside shock and surprise, there is a liberating ‘aha’ feeling. People suddenly see the reasons why in some areas things are not quite right.
The individual working relationships are primarily a matter for the people at either end, but we find that people sometimes prefer working in triads rather than dyads on understanding and resolving the asymmetries. A third person can often bring a valuable outside perspective to the table.
More importantly, by having these individual sessions take place as part of a team session, the context helps create a sense of common ownership, rather than delegation (or abdication) to the problematic relationships.
And ultimately, it is through common commitment to improving performance that these pernicious organizational mismatches are turned into matches made in heaven.
This article was written by Koen Smets and Paul Thoresen.
Thank you for reading this post. If you enjoyed it, please consider clapping for it by, tapping, nudging or otherwise activating the clapping hands 👏 icon nearby. That makes it easier for others to find (and enjoy) it too. And please also share it far and wide (handy icons are hereabouts for Facebook and Twitter; for LinkedIn and others, you need to DIY :-). Thanks again!
