In this episode from the Festival of Org Design, OD experts Joemmy Ramirez and Mary Selden explore the art and science of developing effective org design functions within large organizations. They discuss unconventional career paths and innovative approaches to modern organizational challenges, along with the crucial elements for reshaping and future-proofing organizational structures. Joemmy and Mary provide invaluable advice for leaders, highlighting the importance of adaptability, strategic foresight, and the evolving role of technology in organizational design.
Show Notes:
Organization Design Forum - https://organizationdesignforum.org/
Transcript
Tim Brewer: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Org Design Podcast. We're recording live at the ODF conference, a conference for org designers. Amy, thank you so much for joining again, leading the podcast, co host, Amy Springer and myself, Tim Brewer. Today, we're so lucky, actually to focus, specifically, on the building of internal functions of org design in larger organizations. We have Joemmy and Mary joining us today and they're going to tell us a little bit about this story, but we're going to focus in on that.
So if you're listening in or you know someone that's just been tapped on the shoulder or has been asked to develop an org design function within their organization, this is the podcast for you. Joemmy, I'm going to focus on you first. Tell us a little bit about how on earth did you get into org design and become an org designer? We've asked this question to a few people. We get some strange things, like, "Yeah, I really wanted to be a lawyer until I studied and then realized I [00:01:00] didn't want to be a lawyer. And now I'm an org designer." What was your journey?
Joemmy Ramirez: Oh, wow. That's actually–
Tim Brewer: Was that close?
Joemmy Ramirez: Not too far off the mark. I mean, if we want to start back from like study, I did study pre-law randomly. That's so funny. Then business law in high school, randomly. But, actually, my background is
Tim Brewer: I've got good intuition.
Joemmy Ramirez: Oh, yeah. Yeah, well, I give off lawyer vibes, that's great. Uh, I don't know what that says about me. But, I studied international relations, so my background– I did not have, like, a traditional IO background, though I had exposure to it pretty early on, so my story is that I started off my career in org development. So, my name got kind of picked out of what I say is a pile. I actually applied to a completely different job in this nonprofit organization in a completely different city. And somehow, the team– I've applied to the role in New York– The team in Boston, headquarters, they were just like, "This person looks like a person that could do org development." I don't know why– still to this day– because it's very unusual to find someone [00:02:00] starting off their career in org development. Usually, it's something you specialize in after you've had some experience in HR. So, that's where I first kind of got exposure to the field of org design.
I worked in the same team as what our org design person worked on, but I didn't do that type of work for quite some time. It wasn't until I transitioned into the field of consulting– management consulting– going into one of the kind of big fours that I officially started to get kind of real exposure to that type of work.
One of my projects was a big pharmaceutical company and they were going through a, process redesign and a new system implementation, and that was going to have some impacts on a number of the teams and would have required some kind of reorganization. And so I came in as the change management expert on that project.
And that's kind of where I started my journey. And then it would take a number of more years to kind of officially go into that role in my next [00:03:00] consulting firm experience, or then I officially did an org diagnostic that led into org design, right? That was the major kind of thing that we found and then formally took a course with Cornell University where I met Mary, randomly.
Mary Selden: Yup.
Joemmy Ramirez: About like four years ago. And then officially got certified, if you will, on org design. But I had already been doing it for some time, even in the organization that I was in. So I moved on to tech after that and then led the org development team, which were also the org design and so set up the frameworks kind of adopted a number of different frameworks, methodologies to retrofit the organization or to fit for that organization. And I'm now doing kind of similar work over at the organization that I'm in now.
Tim Brewer: That's really interesting. So there is something about Mary. Mary, welcome to the podcast.
Mary Selden: Thanks.
Tim Brewer: How did you end up in org design? And what did your parents say? Is that like, "You're doing what?"
Mary Selden: So spoiler. I also stumbled into [00:04:00] org development without any training in that. I thought I was going to be a psych researcher. So I went to grad school to study team dynamics and get my PhD in psychology and I was going to do research.
And I didn't like a lot of it. I loved problem solving. I loved asking the questions. I love learning the answers. I hated everything about the publication process. I hated everything about how long everything took and jumped ship about halfway through into IO psychology and studied leadership and teams. So, I jumped ship and started doing leadership and teams and studying that and with the plan of going into business and working, actually, I wanted to be a leadership development field, coaching, or something along those lines. Coming out of grad school, my most marketable skill, though, was statistics.
So my first job was in doing advanced statistics for an employee engagement survey external [00:05:00] firm. And then from there I got hired to do organizational development on a brand new team in a local, small organization, not having any idea what org development was. So, they started doing program development for employee learning, did recognition programs, helped support their survey.
And then when my leader who hired me there left, a couple of years later, she's like, "Hey, do you want to join my new org design team and help me build another team at State Farm?" And I said, "Yeah, let's do it." And so, I stumbled into both org development and org design. And my first real exposure to it was at my previous company in small ways, but it wasn't until I did Cornell University that I actually got the picture of like, oh, this is what org design is and it's been a fantastic fit ever since. Like, that systems thinking, the work we do, the consulting is exactly where I want to be. So, very much stumbled [00:06:00] into it as well.
Tim Brewer: Yeah, it's not something that I think anyone we've interviewed has started off thinking, "Oh, I want to do org design", but everyone when you get them talking, has got a little bit of org design geek in them. And maybe before we get into building an org design function in a larger organization– because our audience is mostly people who would not consider themselves full time in org design, what advice do you have for people that are really excited by that, maybe are doing it inside of another role?
What is your advice going from that– doing it without the title– now to actually seeing that probably it's a really important part of your career and futures. What advice do you have for them considering a change or looking for more focused role around org design? Is it a career that's emerging? Is it a jump that you've been happy to make?
Mary Selden: I would say it's, I don't know how much of it is a bias, of once I knew what it was, I was seeing it everywhere. You know how that [00:07:00] is, like, the number 23 or whatever. But I have felt like it's a bit of an emerging role and there's been an increase in interest and understanding of, how do you design an organization that is effective, right?
So, org effectiveness, I think was one of words I kept seeing over and over again, when I was looking for work. And then as I came into this role, State Farm was building an org effectiveness division that included org design. So I do think that there's an increased interest in this type of role.
But I know from our own struggles of finding a good talent to bring internal, that there's also a bit of a struggle in finding the right set of skills, because it's consulting, but it's also very technical sometimes, and it involves a lot of relationship building. You're working with everybody from executives down to, sometimes, team members.
So, it's a pretty wide skill set and sometimes hard to find the right balance of those– of course, depending on the type of [00:08:00] org design team you're looking to build, whether it's more of a internal consulting model or a COE (Center for Excellence). And what you'll want out of your org design practitioners in each of those situations may be a little bit different in terms of skill set, their scope, et cetera.
Joemmy Ramirez: Yeah, I did all of that. And I actually have had some experience in both the internal consulting team, external, and then also being a part of a COE. And I would say that what I have found is that, typically, this role, org design, is a part of a role that some sort of function in the organization plays.
So to your point, I'm not seeing it pop up as often as a person's single kind of focus, because it is a number of different things that need to be kind of at play there. It requires kind of a certain level of context of the organization and trust, relationship building. And then what I am seeing in terms of patterns of individuals that end up landing in these types of roles is, I do see folks [00:09:00] that have that kind of management consulting type background. Whether it's from a smaller boutique firm or a larger firm, not so much as important as the type of skill set that you're bringing in, the ability to be able to build those relationships, be a bit more technical.
There is when– in my opinion– done really well, org design does require more of like, the data and that analytics part of things, right? It's not just like the moving of boxes and lines. I think a lot of the times, folks are like, "Oh, that's just like taking some boxes and moving this over there."
And it's more than that. A lot of data goes– or should go– behind that, those decisions. And so, I say my suggestion to anyone that's interested in the field is to kind of get familiar with kind of those key components that build into org design roles. The org effectiveness piece, absolutely. That's where I kind of feel like the trends are moving towards internal org design teams.
I have seen, though, as an external [00:10:00] consultant that, larger organizations, at times, feel much more comfortable, for whatever reason, bringing in an external expert. I think there's a couple of things that go into that, right? It's because there's this unbiased opinion that, that organization can bring in.
They kind of can see the macro in a way that folks that potentially sit in the organization, leadership feels like they might not have that perspective. But I am seeing that more and more there is this need to have a team internally that can be able to understand the complexities of the organization, the culture of the organization, which plays such a big role in making these types of decisions.
So I am seeing a trend of that being something that these organizations are more interested in building in-house, even if they bring in this external consulting team.
Tim Brewer: Yeah, I think that's super interesting. Just, context for everyone, the organization you're in at the moment has how many people?
Joemmy Ramirez: Hovering around 200,000, give or take.
Tim Brewer: It's really, really important for context. So let's say, like, heading towards 100,000, like [00:11:00] you're in that 70 or 80,000 range, I think, Mary.
Mary Selden: We're at 58/59,000
Tim Brewer: So, two fairly large organizations.
So we got a lot of leaders, but we do have a lot of executives, owners, managing directors. And they're looking at their organization and either assuming that every manager does org design. Or it's just done in HR, like "Our HR business partners who are great, but they do org design, right?"
Like the number of conversations I've had around that, I'm like, "I don't know. You should ask them." And then they ask and they're like, "We definitely do not do that." But sometimes they do. It can exist in ghost forms in many different places in the organization. If we're sitting here with an audience of very senior leaders or maybe even board members, how do you help them think through where the right place for org design is to exist? And how do they know when they're ready to start thinking about building their own org design function?
Mary Selden: I think for me, there's a couple of considerations. So, for one part of your question, when you ask about [00:12:00] when is the organization ready, I think there's good reasons to org design and there's bad reasons to org design. And some of the best reasons to org design in general, or even consider bringing in a capability– whether that's through a consultant or internally– is when you have shifts in your strategy. When you want to add a new product, a new market. Like, when is something big happening where you may need to work in a different way?
If you find that there's a lot of inefficiencies, decisions are slow, communication isn't great. Those are good reasons to bring in the skill set of org design into the organization. And there's really not a wrong way to bring it in. I think people hesitate to bring it in, but there's no wrong way to bring it in. And it really depends on your organization. How often are you shifting in those ways? Maybe you don't need an internal capability, if you're not doing micro org design projects, you're not shifting. If you're fine that you want to [00:13:00] evolve slowly over time and you see your company growing, you see yourself wanting to really evolve multiple business areas. I think large businesses, this fits quite well because there are so many moving pieces. Having an internal capability that's more consistent, that knows your culture, like Joemmy was saying, can be a value add that can also cut your external vendor and consulting costs.
So, you know, it's an investment like anything else. Do you want to invest in this capability? Do you see a continued need for it in your organization? That would be a reason to consider either developing your folks, your HR business partners, a COE, developing an internal consulting, extending your strategy function to include org design as part of their scope of work.
Any of those could be options for organizations looking to have internal org design capabilities. And it's really, where does it fit? How often do you [00:14:00] need it? How much are you empowering certain existing roles to expand their role and skill set, versus how much do you think you'll need a dedicated person /set of people to support that in your organization, based on how much change you really think you're going to be implementing over time.
Amy Springer: Yeah, Mary, you have given great examples of when an organization is ready. Both of you guys work for organizations that have had that foresight and insight to have someone embedded in their organization. I'd love to know though, on the ground, every day, where does your work tend to come from? Is it a mixture of those strategic considered pieces? Is it also a little bit of reactive firefighting? Where does your work come from?
Joemmy Ramirez: In my case, it very much varies. There is the inevitable, "Well, there was a leadership change and therefore now we need to reevaluate whether this organization is structured." That's usually where I'm seeing a lot of it be triggered and that's more [00:15:00] reactive.
Mary Selden: Same, same
Joemmy Ramirez: But, what I am finding that gives me hope is that there is more work coming out of the diagnosis that's happening with when we do organizational health diagnosis. There is more work popping up there, at least in my current organization. And I think that is, that's a positive trend.
So, it's a varied bag. I do think also with all of the transformations happening in these organizations– transformation is such a buzzword right now– technology is very much impacting roles and skills that are required for these new, kind of, either tools or just the different ways that we're using GenAI. So, I'm seeing more of that also pop up and considerations around, "Well, how will this impact roles and structure?" So, it's shifting currently and in a way that I had not seen before– even three years ago– I feel like it's post COVID world.
Mary Selden: Yeah, very similar. I think as leaders are shifting around, as people [00:16:00] are thinking about, strategically, how they want to divide up work at the highest leadership levels, it's triggering the desire to look down into their groups and really do an evaluation. My company's pretty old. We're about 100 years old. And so, there's certain areas that they've, sort of, evolved organically. And sometimes, that's created some opportunities– with the advent of technology and inclusion of it– to say, "Hey, are we doing the work the best way we could?" So a lot of ours come in through executives and through conversations with HR business partners to say, "Hey, we have a need and we are trying to evolve in this way, in that way", whatever it is. Like, "What resources can we pull on to help support us through these changes? And then some of it is– we actually have some smaller scale work around role design, too. So, our group does everything, kind of, from an operating model and high level functions down to, like, structure, interaction models, all the way down to role design that leads into job design [00:17:00] with our compensation partners. So, we, sometimes, will get smaller scoped work that's more at the team and role level, but primarily we are seeing– and I think it's a trend again right now with technology. We tend to have bigger transformations that are higher priority and are supported more by our team than some of the smaller things which can be either partially supported, more advisory, or even led by non-specialists.
Tim Brewer: One of the things that we track pretty closely– we build software, Damian's a mathematician. You've both met my co-founder and team member, Damien. We are, like, right on the bleeding edge of what people are doing, both in technology and in AI. And so, what's been seen out in industry, we're like one, I call a horizon six months right now, which normally we're, like, three years. So it's happening way, way, way faster than I've ever seen before in my life, having worked in technology. And we think a lot about how [00:18:00] that's going to impact the speed in which org design happens.
So, everyone at the moment at conference is talking about how that happens with the tools we've got and how it can make our life slightly easier and how we can support more people in big organizations on and offline with tooling and frameworks and things like that– which I think, me and Mary, that's mostly what we talk about. But, we worry actually that fast forward two or three years, if every organization is seeing someone in their industry go really hard at AI– I've got an organization in a pretty large industry, where at the moment, their current way of delivering most of the organization services has a margin of X, and another organization comes along and they can produce those same services, in that global industry, for 20% of the gross margin cost of the current way of doing that for the whole industry. [00:19:00] It's not like, "Oh we got like 5% better, it's, "We invented a new way of delivering this whole thing."
So, you've got the whole of the industry does it like this, and then there's a new way that's drastically– like a completely different business model. Those other organizations aren't sitting around like, "We're going to do org design to make things a little bit better." They actually, kind of, need to reinvent.
I think about a world where we're not doing these big three-year transformations and then we get to have, like, a break. Everyone gets to relax and get normal again. We're going to have this kind of cascading. I mean, adding COVID to that, we're going to be exacerbating remote work, etc. And how do you think about equipping your organizations for change when change will just be like, we're not going to be going from one big change to the next, we're, kind of, going to be needing to be a lot more dynamic in the way org design gets done, and equipping managers to be able to see and respond to those changes, in timeframes, are you seeing timeframes compress [00:20:00] around what executives expect you to do with org design projects? And how do you think about equipping your organization for a culture of org design*,* different to what we may have never, you know, ever seen before?
Mary Selden: I think that's a strategic decision, right? So, we talked about how do you want to integrate org design into your organization? If it is a capability, you want to grow across your organization. You want to empower your leaders to be making good org design decisions that are aligned with strategies and changing strategies.
That is a way a strategic way to integrate org design and the way you do that, structurally the way you incorporate that capability into your organization may be a little different than an organization where they're like, "Hey, we don't want to be changing all the time cause that can produce change fatigue and that's exhausting." we want to just have these almost review cycles for who we are and what we do. And we want to [00:21:00] stay some of the course or, you know, again, strategic decision to be less change happy, maybe, probably poorly worded description. But, then you might consider, okay, then we just want resources we can tap into when we need that, right? So how much is that capability going to be part of your strategic advantage for your organization? If that's the case, building it in, integrating it into existing roles, into manager roles, into HRBPs, right? Wherever that is, that has that broader spread in the organization can be really valuable.
That being said, the companies that don't want to do that they don't want that change fatigue, they are okay with this idea of circling back to their organization and, sort of, tweaking every few years. You may find that that's not something you want to invest in, in your people.
You want them focused on, maybe, other work. And so that would be a decision point to say, "Hey, we may want again – an external consultant to come in when we need them." And you can determine what that [00:22:00] is, what are your criteria, or have a team that is internal, you can tap when you need them, that you are leveraging across the organization. A COE, a person, an individual, whoever, whatever that looks like for your organization, that would be an option, right? So, do you want the capability broad? How do you build that into people's roles? Do you want the capability centralized, so that you can use it as a tool in your toolbox? Or do you want that capability as something that you can use periodically? You may choose a different option, like an external consultant.
Joemmy Ramirez: I would add a bit to that. I just want to address the compressed timeline bit because I think that comes up ever so often, right?
Mary Selden: Uh, all the time.
Joemmy Ramirez: All the time. It's like, "You can do this in three months, right?" I mean, you could, but not well, probably. I mean, for the types of organizations that I work for, right? Like, larger organizations, what you're trying to bite off, right? It's quite a bit to try to
Mary Selden: The volume of change, the number of [00:23:00] people impacted. You can responsibly do things in maybe timelines that are a little longer.
Joemmy Ramirez: But I do like this, what you said, I do think that there is this component this, kind of, education that I do every time that I engage a business leader. Whether that's done on a one to one, a one-off in every engagement that I do, or whether that's, kind of, something that we build in as a capability, as a part of the COE, or the team that I'm a part of. I think that it's important for leaders to understand the end-to-end process and the risks, the pros and the cons of going with a more compressed timeline. Because a lot of the times they're entering into the situations and they're not org design experts. I don't expect them to be, right? So, they're going into it with the best of intentions. But they don't really, fully, quite understand why I'm hesitant to go about it in three months, right? So there's that piece, then there's the education piece for just the team that's going to be working on this project. And also we talk about it so much, skin in the game, right?
Also, what's required? It's not just gonna be me going [00:24:00] off and moving our things around and just grabbing pieces of data and coming back to you. There's a requirement of your team being a participant of this and you being a participant of this leader, B or A, that is required.
But then there's also this piece of enablement, to a certain extent. I feel like in order for it to be sustainable in larger organizations, my opinion, it's best done when you equip parts of the organization, primarily HR business partners, with at least some base level understanding of the end-to-end org design process and also the components and the criteria that needs to be met in order for it to be done well.
Mary Selden: Yeah, and it's that idea that, "Oh, we have to go fast because we need to meet business need." When, you know, we often say, "Oh, well, you need to go slow to go fast." It's like, what matters more? Getting quickly through the org design and into implementation? Or bringing people along this transformation journey, so that your implementation is the fast part, right?
And so, that's typically [00:25:00] the trade off that we try to articulate with our business leaders is that the work that we're doing takes what it takes. And a lot of it is decision making and thinking on their end and strategic choices that don't happen overnight. As much as you want to think, "Oh yeah, well I can make a decision on how this structure is." There's a lot of conversation that needs to happen across leadership teams, across, sometimes, the manager teams even as you're thinking about reshuffling work or moving people around, and conversations take time.
And really, I boil org design as we are facilitating conversations with folks. And those conversations are leading to decisions, and that takes time. And if you want a successful implementation, bringing in as many of those people as early as possible into those conversations, and working through all the bugs and the conflicts and the change management of it, is so critical.
And so, yes, we get pushed on timeline. How can we be bigger, better, faster, stronger? And I think we need to be [00:26:00] thinking about that. We also need to be thinking about micro designs over broad transformations for the groups, that's strategically what they want to do but, sometimes the work takes what the work takes.
Sometimes, the conversations take longer than you think they're going to take. And so, there's a level of flexibility, I think, that needs to be in these projects, that is hard when we're very deadline driven. And when you don't have a clear understanding on the scope of change that you're willing to make and what the implications are to that, and that's part of our job as org designers is to help illuminate that process, identify the risks and go as fast as we can, responsibly for the organization.
Amy Springer: Thank you, Mary. Thank you, Joemmy. I have learned so much from you guys. I hope everyone listening does as well. Thank you for being at the Festival of Org Design. Thank you for joining us on the podcast.
Mary Selden: Thank you guys.
Joemmy Ramirez: Thank you for having us. [00:27:00]
