At CAP we are fortunate to work with some of Australia’s largest organisations to help them improve their organisational design.
Our experience supported by current thinking and research have lead us to believe that there are other, less understood reasons why organisational redesigns are sometimes not the success they should be
In this blog, we will discuss the first of these and provide you with some thoughts on how you can better mitigate the risk they pose.
One reason is a competency mismatch, between the role as it has been designed and the candidate who fills it.
During any restructure a large amount of time is dedicated to defining roles that best meet the objectives of the review, align with contemporary practice and support an organisation’s recruitment activities.
However, not every redesign is supported by an evidenced-based approach to assessing a candidate’s required competencies, as detailed in the role design.
A cornerstone of contemporary role design is the identification and agreement of required competencies, whether they are an ability to support an organisation’s strategic direction, develop productive relationships, etc.
We have found that an organisation’s ability to assess a candidate’s current competencies to ensure that there is a match with the intended role design or understand where gaps exist can impact the success of any implementation.
We also understand that our clients work in fast paced and complex organisational systems that often require compromises to be made during both the design and implementation process.
Some factors we have seen that impact an organisation’s ability to match candidates with required role competencies can include:
- Relative size of the recruitment pool: for some organisations, especially those that operate in remote locations, the relative size of the recruitment pool can adversely impact the quality of the candidates provided
- Time pressure to fill: arbitrary deadlines set internally can place time constraints on both the design and implementation process
- Lack of understanding by key stakeholders: the financial and organisational benefits of taking a structured approach to organisational design are not always understood by senior decision makers. For some, organisational design can be a process to solve people problems, not organisational ones.
This is the start of a series of blogs on things that interest us in the Organisational Development space. We are keen to hear your thoughts and share your experiences, so leave us a comment below.