Autonomy just one aspect of business personality
If you can afford to take 10 minutes out of your day, then grab a cup of coffee and get yourself in front of an internet connection to watch this very impressive marketing video. Not only is it an excellent piece of creative operational marketing(incidentally, the book being marketed has nothing to do with me), but it also portrays an important message about one technique which organisations may consider deploying to get the most and the best out of their people.
Whilst the cleverness of the marketing itself is notable(and I would imagine we will see many variations on this theme in the future), it is important to recognise that smart marketing ideas tend to come and go. That is the nature of creative marketing.
So, why highlight this particular technique? Well, in this case, the author’s focus on Autonomy and Mastery bears significant long-term relevance for all professional(or cognitive) services organisations.
Autonomy is one of the core personality traits which we address as part of the process of determining and then shaping an organisation’s personality. The original work by Mintzberg and Ghoshal, which has inspired this blog and underpins the concept of organisational personality, juxtaposes ‘Autonomy’ and ‘Synergy’ as a balanced trade-off.
As you might expect, the trade-off suggested by Mintzberg and Ghoshal considers how tightly coupled the constituent parts or silos of an organisation might be, and the relative benefits of loose and tight coupling. Their perspective is clear: “tight integration reduces a multi-business enterprise to a single entity, perhaps destroying some of the potential benefits of diversity. Thus, a major issue in organisation design is to nuance the trade-off between Autonomy and Synergy”.
From the perspective of organisational personality, this trade-off can contribute towards determining how the organisation is perceived externally across two personality spectra: ‘Synergistic’ being team-oriented but with the potential for introspection and slow, consensual decision-making and ‘Autonomous’ being flexible and responsive, but with the potential for maverick tendencies.
However these two spectra alone cannot paint a full picture of an organisation’s personality, characteristics or drivers. The clever piece of marketing discussed above suggests that the benefits of autonomy may be derived from explicitly giving employees more time to be creative for the company, and enabling them to relish the challenge of ‘purpose’. For some businesses, this may be valid, yet it is surely just one part of a more complex answer. Only when the range of personality features displayed by a business are better understood can executive leadership confidently begin the process of shaping how the business will be portrayed and perceived in the future.
Given that maverick tendencies tend to reside at the extremes of the Autonomy/Synergy spectrum, for many businesses, the individualism inherent in Autonomy as an organisational characteristic may bring benefits but also has the potential to undermine an organisation’s core systems & processes and ultimately pull the organisation apart.
It is therefore important that each of the criteria which comprise organisational personality are assessed in conjunction with all others, rather than in isolation. This enables the organisation to, in the words of Mintzberg and Ghoshal, “sustain a dynamic balance” and present the uniqueness of the organisation’s personality to the marketplace. A singular, ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution will never suffice.
DropDown Theme