Summary
In this episode of the Org Design Podcast, organizational design expert Jodie Goulden shares valuable insights on leadership transitions and organizational effectiveness. She discusses the concept, shared by Beth Gunderson at the 2024 ODF conference, the challenges leaders face when moving from operational roles ("the dance floor") to strategic positions ("the balcony"), particularly in rapidly growing organizations.
Key highlights include:
- The importance of balancing strategic oversight with operational understanding
- Practical techniques for facilitating organizational diagnosis without external consultants
- Strategies for helping technically proficient leaders adapt to broader management roles
- Methods for addressing organizational overwhelm and creating sustainable systems
Jodie emphasizes the power of collaborative problem-solving and shares how leaders can create space for different perspectives when addressing organizational challenges. She provides practical advice for leaders who may feel uncomfortable stepping away from day-to-day operations to take a more strategic view.
Whether you're a new leader adjusting to a larger scope of responsibility or an experienced executive looking to improve organizational effectiveness, this episode offers valuable insights into modern leadership challenges and organizational design principles.
Show Notes
Orgdesign Works - https://www.orgdesignworks.com/
Organization Design Forum - https://organizationdesignforum.org/
Beth Gunderson - https://www.linkedin.com/in/beth-gunderson-845747/
Transcript
[00:00:00] Tim Brewer: Hi, welcome to the Org Design Podcast.
We are recording live here at the Org Design Festival in Twin Cities. We have today with us, Jodie Goulden. Something special is Jodie, myself, and Amy all come from the same hometown, Perth, Australia, which for those of you listening in from the U. S., is a little bit more like , San Diego- esque, very laid back, beachside city. Thanks for joining us. Jod ie is also heavily involved here with the organizing and helping out around the conference. I met her last year at the conference, so a really, great community here and Jodie's a part of that. We'll talk a little bit about today and the content that's been at conference.
So, it's going to be a little bit more focused on people that have a bit more org design flair. Maybe you're an org design geek in your organization, or you're a consultant, or you're in a big consulting firm, or maybe you are on an internal org design team at a company doing org design just in one place.
[00:01:01] Amy Springer: I guess before we get into the day , how did you end up in org design? Tell us about your story.
[00:01:07] Jodie Goulden: I bet you're collecting a lot of really good stories because a lot of people ended up in Org Design, I think, somehow, by accident or by fate.
[00:01:15] Amy Springer: Lots of, by accident, is the key quote of the day.
[00:01:18] Jodie Goulden: Yeah, okay. My story is that I spent many years working inside a big, complex, global organization. Which was wonderful. I got to work in just about every HR role that there is in that organization, and I was really lucky, too, because I got to live and work all around the world, in Asia and Europe and North America. But also getting the experience of what it feels like to be a leader in that, kind of, big company.
If you're in the corporate headquarters, if you're in some far flung production site, if you are helping a business with their strategy, or if you are really operational and just dealing with the day to day firefighting. What that taught me is a couple of things. One is, how do those complex organizations work? Or sometimes not work, right? And also, the other takeaway is that those corporations are full of amazing people. Really smart, talented, inspired, wanting to have an impact. And what's holding people back is often the way that the organization is designed. So, there's all these kind of levers that you can pull that changes the way we do things that makes work just really hard. You're dealing with the bureaucracy and politics and hierarchy and all these things that are stopping you from getting your work done.
So when I went independent into the world as a consultant and I knew I still wanted to work with corporations, I decided to really focus on organization design because what my experience told me is, there's so much you can do to get the organization set up in a way that works, so that people can get stuff done that they want to do. And because I really believe that the corporate world has a really important role to play in having a positive impact and so that's what I want to do, help them do that.
[00:03:26] Tim Brewer: That's really cool. Talked about working for a huge global company, lots of complexity. Tell us about what you're doing now. And now, if someone's listening along today, obviously we're going to talk a little bit to the org designers on the pod. But, if you're a manager in a company somewhere, how would they know that you're the right type of partner to bring in and help on a project or help work through an org design problem?
[00:03:48] Jodie Goulden: Org Design Works, that's my company, that's my consulting business. And it's myself and a colleague, Richard Lucas. So, he's based in the UK, and I'm based on the west coast of North America. What we do is we guide leaders in those kind of organizations, to figure out how to understand what's working or not working in their organization and what they might need to change to do what they need to do.
So to achieve their strategy or their purpose. Which is what all design is, very high level. And you asked me, how would someone know if we're the right organization to work with? So if you're, A leader or anyone really who's in an organization, and you have a very ambitious or challenging set of goals or strategy that you want to achieve and you've got great people all around you, but you find that you're seeing that things are stuck or things are not working or it takes you way more time than it really should to get the work done. Maybe you have some theories about why that is. Maybe you think we need more training or we need a different kind of organization structure, or maybe we need to cut costs somewhere. What we can do is help you look through the whole, the big picture and figure out where you really need to make change? The clients that we work with They're not necessarily the ones that are startups, disruptors, leading edge, doing things in a different way. Usually they're the more traditional organizations, the legacy organizations, the big ones. They might be in manufacturing, they have research, they have supply chain, they have a lot of things going on.
Those are the ones where we can really most help.
[00:05:38] Tim Brewer: Cool. That's excellent. Now, Jodie, at some point in that journey, you said you discovered you're an org designer. You woke up one morning, flash of lightning Oh my goodness, I found org design and gravitated towards that. You're now a pretty active participant in the org design festival and the Org Design Forum, which run the festival, volunteer organization. Maybe tell us a little bit about not about the community necessarily, but tell us about the conference today, and what are the highlights been getting together with other org designers and some of the great speakers that have been on.
[00:06:11] Jodie Goulden: Yeah. I'm, I, when I encountered this organization design community, I immediately knew that here's where I can learn a lot. And here's people who, equally as motivated as me to help organizations. So I instantly knew I wanted to be more involved, and now I'm on the board of the ODF. And I'm also a faculty member for the EODF, which is the European Organization Design Forum.
So yeah, I definitely stay pretty involved and coming to this conference, which we run once a year, the festival of old design. It's amazing. So as an example of the kind of things that I heard and that have inspired me today is listening, for example, to Beth Gunderson who talked about systems thinking today, which, when you hear that, you go, whatever, What is that? Whatever that is. But Beth was able to explain it to a way us in a way which was just fun, totally made sense, and it's about being able to look at a situation from multiple perspectives in order to understand it better. And if you have to break it down into all what things might you want to do to make the system work better.
And what I loved, one of the things that Beth talked about was being able to look at things in a She talked about the balcony and the dance floor. I don't know if you heard about that already. So if you are right in the thick of things in your job, you're fighting fires, you're dealing with 17 different crises at once, people are coming to you, you've got a full email inbox, you're on the dance floor, right?
You're in there in the midst of everything. And there's times at which you can, stand on the balcony and look at what's going on and see things from that helicopter view that's when you can understand the situation better. Sounds obvious. As a consultant, you come in and you do have the chance to look at things from the balcony, but you won't understand it properly unless you've got the experience of being on the dance floor in the thick of things.
[00:08:08] Tim Brewer: I love that example. So much.
[00:08:11] Amy Springer: Because you love the dance floor.
[00:08:11] Tim Brewer: That's true. I like dancing.
[00:08:13] Jodie Goulden: Being on the dance floor. And that's, for me, that is something I can take to the companies that I work with. Because, let's say, Um, let's say you are trying =to implement a whole lot of really ambitious projects on a tight timeline, and you know that's the most important and urgent thing you have to do, so you're just super busy doing that.
You say we don't have enough people in our organization to do this, people don't have the right skills, we need to get help to do this. Sometimes someone will come to me as a consultant and say we need to help to implement these projects, can you help us? And what I can do is say, what I can help you with, because I'm standing on the balcony, what I can help you with is to figure out how to build that capability in your organization so that you can do that, so that you'll be able to do it and sustain it.
You don't want me to do that, because that's the core of your work. That's So if you look at it from that balcony point of view, You can see how you're going to be able to make change that sticks, that has a fast impact and that you can continue to build on and helps you achieve your strategy.
[00:09:21] Tim Brewer: That's really cool.
[00:09:22] Amy Springer: You said that a big part of coming to the conference for you is your own learning. I think something so amazing I've witnessed is the range of ages at this conference. We have some really young people and then we have people that are older all talk about retiring, they're failing to retire. They obviously love what they do.
[00:09:41] Jodie Goulden: There's a lot of failing to retire people in this field. Yeah.
[00:09:44] Amy Springer: Just shows how the kind of people that are drawn to org design. What else about being part of this community and this conference do you really love?
[00:09:54] Jodie Goulden: Yeah, you mentioned the variation in ages. But there's also a lot of variety in the people here in terms of what they do.
[00:10:04] Tim Brewer: Tell us a bit about that. Yeah. I'd agree.
[00:10:06] Jodie Goulden: There's people here who are just incredibly skilled at facilitating difficult conversations and coaching people through, complex change transformations. There's people who are working really in the depths of program management implementing, so there's a lot of different ways you can help change a system.
[00:10:26] Tim Brewer: Yeah. The, one thing that surprised me when I came and we met last year in Philadelphia, which is where the previous, ODF conference was at was how many internal org design teams from very large companies or they're building out a function internally came along and how different it was thinking about the role of org design as a permanent internal person in big org, permanent internal person in a smaller org, as a consultant in a small team, there's a few solo consultants, boutique consultant, consulting firms, there's a few larger firms, all the way up to the institutional firms that are also present here. You really have just about every format of org design and HR business partners that are. Org geeks, but they're like I'm not like an org designer, but I'm like a fair amount of my role. I end up doing org design. And then there's even just a few executives that are just this is their jam.
[00:11:22] Jodie Goulden: And I would say that nearly every executive is doing org design, whether they know it or not. And that's an interesting thing because org design is also it's whenever you have any group of people, Which is basically any team who are collaborating together in order to do something. So that's basically any team.
Then you've got an organization design challenge. And if you're a leader, then you're making decisions all the time about how do I divide up the work so that all the work gets done? How do I divide it between the people? How do I then make sure that they're communicating with each other in a way that all the work comes together?
How do I then reward those people and make sure that they are going to stay in their role and that they're motivated and they grow? How am I going to, like, how do we communicate? What kind of information does everyone need? All of those are the kind of pieces that add up to the design of the organization so that you can get something done.
[00:12:19] Tim Brewer: If you're a leader and you've got people that are reporting to you, you're going to have some kind of decisions you're making that are org designed. What happens when a leader is got too much time on the dance floor.
I'm going to roll with this analogy. So hey, I'm down on the dance floor, Tim. This is my calendar. My calendar looks like it's a barcode. It's just like completely jammed full. And I know there's a balcony up there, but I haven't been in it in ages. Maybe I go there once per year at Christmas, maybe in January for half a week when no one's in the office.
And you're sitting there thinking there's not going to be, you're not gonna be able to do effective or make effective decisions from the balcony, from needing a balcony view. When you're still a dance floor in a company of hundreds of people, maybe they're a founder, maybe they've just gone into a new role and haven't been leading a team that's that large.
We had another story of someone that went in, got a job, landed in the role, their manager resigned, and then their manager's manager resigned and they end up in the seat leading this enormous team.
When you're sitting with leaders who have called you and said, Hey, Jodie I think we've got an org design problem. How do you start that conversation? Are they scared? Are you scared?
[00:13:24] Jodie Goulden: Yeah. I, unfortunately they don't usually call me and say I've got an organizational design problem.
[00:13:30] Amy Springer: Spot on. Spot on.
[00:13:31] Jodie Goulden: But and the other thing is some of them are really good dancers. And they, they got promoted because That's why they're there. For a moment, I
[00:13:39] Tim Brewer: thought you meant actual dancing, but now I realise it's You know, we're going,
[00:13:42] Jodie Goulden: we're rolling with the No, but they, they've been recognised and they've been promoted because they are really good at executing the operational part of their role.
And they're not good at finding their way onto the balcony in this idea. And I think there's no escaping it. The only way that they're going to be successful is they have to figure out how to get onto the balcony sometimes.
I don't think that someone else can give them that view for them, but as a consultant, as an org design consultant, what I can do is start to have the conversation by asking some big questions and by agreeing with them that we're going to spend some time to talk about these big questions on the balcony I'm inviting them them to the balcony in a way by asking those big questions.
The thing is that It's not, you can't solve everything by staying up there. You also have to come down and look at all the details, and that's why this is so complex, right? Because you have to be able to understand a fair bit of detail of what's happening in the day to day role.
That's one of the big reasons why in the work that I do, I facilitate Getting that information, sharing information and inviting a lot of people from different parts of the organization to participate in the design. So that you'll be able to understand the complexity of what's happening.
Like what's happening with the customers. Who is talking to the customers? Let's find out how they're seeing this. Situation what's happening in the plant where the products are getting produced. Let's understand what's happening from that perspective. As the leader of the organization, can't possibly see all those perspectives at once.
[00:15:22] Amy Springer: So for someone that doesn't have access to a consultant or wouldn't even think to go to a consultant, but they're listening to us today, do you have a suggestion for what they could do? A technique, a thought process, anything, or just help them get out of it?
[00:15:38] Jodie Goulden: Yeah, that's a great question, because being your own facilitator is another important leadership skill, right? So you can, so as a leader, Bring your team together in a workshop and create some space for to listen to the different perspectives on the organization.
So you can already set up a space to have to do a diagnosis by asking people to reflect on and put down their thoughts on what are You know, what are the things that are helping us to get our work done in our organization today? What are the things that are stopping us? Let's all put that information, on some stickies and put them on the wall, and then let's step back and reflect on that and see what does that tell us.
You can certainly facilitate your own process of inquiry, which is a bit different, I think, to what, As a leader you often feel like, you don't feel like that's your job, you feel like your job is to come in and tell the team what the problems are and what the next steps are. So it requires quite a switch to say, okay, we're going to do this together and I'm going, my, my job is to facilitate all of you to speak.
But it's a really powerful and effective way to lead if you can find the courage to do that.
[00:16:55] Tim Brewer: Yeah. Really interesting. I've seen as I've watched leaders in organizations, and I'd like your advice on it. Maybe we've all been in the situation where you're observing someone's very good on the dance floor, they've come up through the ranks of dancing. They've been rewarded for the dancing. That's why they're there and one day by their own choice or by function of them being there long enough, they've ended up in a role or accountability that requires them to, from time to time, to get on the balcony.
But in their heart of hearts, they don't see or feel the validation or value of spending time on the balcony. In fact, they feel completely unproductive and invaluable.
How do you help them increase the value of them spending time on the balcony when you're consulting with a leader that you see that kind of not a reticence, but They just don't apply the same value to being on the dance floor.
[00:17:50] Jodie Goulden: Yeah. So my experience working with leaders who they might feel like this is not where I want to be, or this doesn't feel valuable for me, is to actually work through it together. Actually, I work with quite a lot of engineers and scientists. And if I'm working with them and facilitating a group, something that I like to do is share with them at each step what I'm doing.
Hey, we just started this with a check in check in round. Here's what the outcomes are that we've got from that. And here's, here's how people in the room felt. And they really like it. They're like, oh. If I follow these steps, then I can get these outcomes. And experience is when people see what the impact is, and they see that it's easier to do than they thought Then they start to appreciate the value.
[00:18:42] Tim Brewer: Jodie, that was super interesting. I love the wrap on today, particularly the stuff about the dance floor and the balcony. I think it's a really practical reflection that any leader, as they start to be leading teams of teams, needs to think about. I thought it was really great. We have a pack of org design facilitation cards. We put a bunch of them out on the table and we let you have a look just to let your intuition follow till we found a card. The card you picked was the 10 of innovations. The three words that go with that are overwork, burden, and responsibility overload.
You chose that. Maybe explain, you can talk off the picture, talk off what you felt when you picked it up and why that was important to you to chat about today.
[00:19:25] Jodie Goulden: Yeah.
When I see this picture of this very overwhelmed and overworked person, I think I picked that because that's what I, sometimes that's what I see In my clients and in my network that's how people are feeling. They're really feeling that they're totally overwhelmed and that finding their way and you came with a great example, finding their way to look at things from the bigger perspective is just too hard.
And I really feel that's our, that's part of our job is helping people to see that they have agency. That they can make change. So sometimes when it feels like the system's not working for me. This is just how it is. I just have to work around it or I just have to do things in the way.
I think that what we can do with org design is show people, Hey, actually, you are the designer of the system, or, we collectively, we've put these rules in place, or we've put this governance in place, or whatever it is, we've put the process in place, we can also change it. So if we can find a smarter way to do things and then, it will open up the organization to be able to actually achieve what we want.
[00:20:36] Tim Brewer: That's really cool.
Thank you so much for joining us today, Amy, thank you for co hosting again and leading the podcast effort.
This has been a great day. So good to have guests on the show with such great insights for everyday leaders and org design experts. If people like an org designer or a. Or geek, and they're interested in the org design festival or the org design forum. You can go online, they have a website, they're on LinkedIn and a great organic volunteer led community to be a part of if you have that penchant around org design.
But for today, that is it. Thank you for joining us again, another edition of the org design podcast coming from you live from twin cities, USA, and we'll see you all again soon.
[00:21:25] Amy Springer: Thanks, Jodie.
[00:21:26] Tim Brewer: Thanks, Jodie.
