You’ve no doubt heard the saying “When we don’t know what to do, we do more of what we know”. A lot of us saw this play out during the crazy uncertainty of the pandemic. Some business owners reimagined, pivoted and came out even stronger while others double-downed on what they knew and watched their businesses falter. Some of them have yet to recover.
There are a lot of organizational theories out there but one that captured my attention years ago and actually held it is the idea of looking at organizations as a composite of four different frameworks. (Bolman and Deal) The original content is substantive and fortunately for you, I will simplify it greatly but it is worth considering as we come out of the pandemic.
Viewing your organization through the four different frameworks of structure, people, power and symbols helps you define and broaden the questions to ask and the answers worth considering, especially in times of crisis. Frameworks help organize facts and start to make sense of complexities and connect seemingly disconnected information. They help reimagine a way forward through evolving landscapes. They help create strategies for moving forward that are intuitive and responsive to the actual facts.
Some questions worth delving into within these framework discussions:
1. Structures Frame: Who does what, when do they do it and how where is the synergy between groups?
2. People Frame: How is your organization managing relationships, between employees and management and between the employees themselves?
3. Power Frame: When your organizational context is scarcity and the infighting that comes with scarcity, how do you go about setting agendas, mapping political terrain, networking, building coalitions and negotiating? What are the built-in power structures that either hinder or propel momentum as a whole?
4. Symbols Frame: What is your company culture? What are the symbols that speak meaning into your brand? What is the narrative around your brand from the client perspective? From the employee perspective? How do all of these affect your team dynamics?
As individuals, each of us will naturally lean into different frameworks, which is why four people can view the same exact situation and come away with very different conclusions. Effective leaders can learn to sort through these narratives and match the right story to the situation at hand. I call it reframation and it is powerful.
Keep in mind that organizations are much more complex than we imagine, surprising us more than we care to admit with soap-opera worthy deceitfulness and much ambiguity. This is why you should absolutely set time aside to look at your organization through these different frames with your team. Bringing in an outsider to lead these discussions, someone who isn’t emotionally attached to the hard conversations and next steps that will inevitably come out of these sessions, is critical to success.
Here's to building in regular reframation check-ins that lead to the kind of growth that is healthy and sustainable. Here’s to success!