Healthy Organization: The Basics

The healthy organization means the efficient organization. The healthy organization is successful, competes aggressively, attract the best talents and uses innovation as the source of the competitive advantage. The development of the healthy organization is difficult and needs a close and clear attention of top executives.

Each organization builds unhealthy trends into its processes, procedures and management practices. Organizations value past successes and the leaders have no courage to act on corporate heroes of past. Each organization introduces inefficiencies and HR has to point such gaps in the organization.

The healthy organization investigates opportunities for the improvement of its organizational design. It runs regular processes and it makes a decision about changes to introduce higher efficiency at least once a year.

The healthy organization monitors the number of managerial layers. It sets procedures to evaluate the number of layers. It is not true, that the flatter organization is better than the complex organization. The organization has to be manageable.

The healthy organization has the procedures for the management of the span of control. It does not allow to grow the managerial population beyond its abilities. The large managerial population makes changes impossible. It protects its interests and the top management has no chance to influence employees positively. The healthy organization does not allow to managers hire additional managers.

The healthy competitive organization regularly assess the potential of employees and managers. It does not hide gaps, but it runs the development programs for employees as skills and competencies are enhanced. The healthy organization is the learning organization. This organization runs logical systems of the career development and it makes all employees change job positions. The organization with the rigid managerial structure is not healthy. Employees lose their trust as they cannot be promoted. The competitive organization creates and cancel job positions and allows employees to apply for the new job challenges.

The healthy organization has the courage to change the corporate culture. It supports the culture of finding new creative and innovative ways of doing business and things. It does not value the stability. It values successes and it celebrates failures. It uses failures as best practices for the future. The learning from failures is taken as the best opportunity to create new challenging products and services.

The organizational design is the challenging HR process. Managers complain about its results and they do not agree and they do not support all outcomes. They feel that the organizational design puts their jobs in danger. The organizational design is dangerous for managers not working on the improvements and introduction of innovations.