Structure First, People Second

One of the most critical things for any business is creating a Great Team. In EOS, the People Component is all about building a great team, what we call “getting the Right People in the Right Seats”. In a recent post, I talked about cultural fit – what we call “Right People”. Today, I’d like to talk about how we get those Right People into the Right Seats. This brings up what a question that should be obvious, but is often overlooked. That is, how do we know exactly what the Right Seats are?

You see, when leaders gauge how well an employee is performing, the yardstick for measurement is often based upon the way that particular person does that particular job, not whether that person is doing what the company actually needs out of that seat!

Every leader wants to put the right person to put into every seat. But the reality is that once they do, they often shape the seat to fit the person. So when I ask a Leadership Team “what do you need out of the person in this seat”, they often begin by telling me what the current owner of the seat does. But that isn’t the question I asked. I asked “what do you need out of the person in that seat?”. And it may or may not be what the current owner of that seat does today.

This is what makes defining the Right Seats so hard. It is natural for us to think about our organization through the lens of the people we already have. To overcome that bias, we use an approach we call “Structure First, People Second”. When we begin building out a company’s Accountability Chart (the tool that defines the right structure for the organization – the very definition of what the Right Seats are), we begin by taking the people out of it. We put all the people on the sidelines as we begin the exercise – no one in the organization has a job. That eliminates the bias of “they way things have always been.”

From there, we determine what seats are needed going forward.  Then we define exactly what we want to hold each seat accountable for. Only after we’ve done those two things can we go back to those people we put on the sidelines and find out who REALLY fits that seat.

For someone to fit their seat three things MUST be true. They have to:

·      Get It – This means the person is genetically encoded to do this job – they are just wired that way. If you’ve ever referred to someone as a “born salesperson” or a “born engineer” you know exactly what this means

·      Want It – They’ve got to be excited to do the job. You may have someone who was been born to be an engineer, but they’ve been in that role for 36 years and they are just sick of it. They don’t want it anymore

·      Have the Capacity to Do It – They are able to meet the volume and quality requirements of the job with the resources available (including time)

The goal is to get EVERY person in your organization into the Right Seat. Imagine how much fun it would be to part of an organization where everyone around you is great at what they do. This isn’t utopia – I work with businesses that have made this reality, and it is the standard every business should strive for.   Your business – and your people – deserve no less.