MOSAIC by Jane McNair

Author:Jane McNair
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MOSAIC Change LLC
Published: 2022-09-28T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

Align the Organization

If you don’t use the right glue, your change won’t stick!

I received a request once from a CEO who wanted to pay me six figures to design and implement “team training” for the top two layers of his organization. Let’s call him Henry. Henry had just returned from a Harvard leadership seminar where team training (which was a big trend at the time) was presented as the solution to a high level of internal infighting. He had observed that his employees were not very collaborative across the boundaries of the organization, and he thought that putting them all through training on how to be a better team would solve the problem. So I asked him one simple question: “Is your merit based on individual or team performance?”

Let’s look at why this question is important. Henry’s answer was that “each employee received an annual review of their individual performance and was compensated individually.” If I had spent three months training all his employees on “teaming,” Henry would have been out of a lot of money, and nothing would have changed in his organization. Why? Because the issue he was facing had nothing to do with training or a lack of employee skill. His desire to have employees shift from competitive to collaborative behavior needed to be continually reinforced by a reward system that punished competitive behaviors and reinforced collaborative behaviors. With an individually based reward system, his employees were focused primarily on what they accomplished individually, not collectively. However, if his employees were rewarded based on what the team accomplished, they would be more inclined to perform as a team. Basically his reward system was out of alignment with the change he was trying to drive. That alignment was part of the “glue” that would help Henry sustain the collaborative behaviors he wanted to see in his organization.

In a piece of mosaic art, all the tiles are held together by mortar or grout. That mortar serves as the glue that holds all the individual pieces together over time. This simple idea also applies to change within your organization. If you want the change to last, you need to assess the foundational elements of the organization and ask yourself, “Is this part of the organization set up to reinforce or to work against the change I am trying to make?”

Any element that is not currently supporting the change needs to be modified to do so. This alignment component of the MOSAIC framework is about building the “glue” that creates the “stickiness” that is ultimately required to sustain your change efforts over time. This includes aligning key stakeholders, understanding the impact of the change on customers and other parts of the organization, making modifications to employees’ goals, developing new ways of rewarding employees, changing current policies and practices, and establishing and/or revising current processes. Let’s explore each of these in more detail using examples from the PAX-Z Golf Company.

Today PAX-Z has five manufacturing facilities for the company: four in the United States and one in Canada.

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