So you want to climb the org chart?
How much weight are you willing to shoulder?
Climbing the organizational chart. It is a great feeling, leaving more and more people behind you as you move up in your organization, getting more perks, a nicer office, getting to rub elbows with the top brass, and a higher salary. Having been a CEO I can say that the air can sometimes just be cleaner up there. It is cleaner because there is just more of it to breathe since you are at the top. You don’t have to deal with all of the little details of running the business and hopefully have direct reports that are really good at managing people and executing the plan. If you don’t, that’s your fault and that’s a different article. If you are the least bit competitive, love striving to get to the next level in any of your endeavors, are comfortable taking risks without perfect information and like making the tough decisions….your ascent up the org chart will seem to come naturally and be a great validation of your persona, hard work, and dedication to being the best you can be. Let’s face it, in the chart below, it is certainly better to be at the top than with the masses or worse yet, where you started: at the bottom. Picture yourself there, it literally feels better just imagining it.
The fact is that organizational charts are our of date and a tool of business days gone by. Back in the day, they served the purpose of letting the world know who was “in charge” of what and I will contend that the nature of their structure led to two unfortunate things to happen in companies. First, people with low EQs were promoted to higher and higher positions (a total recipe for disaster) and second, because, on paper, the air is a little nicer up there, people strived to get promoted without regard to the additional WEIGHT of responsibility that comes with the role.
If we consider that the purpose of a corporation as stated by the Business Roundtable last year is to act for the benefit of all stakeholders, ask yourself the following question: Who in the company has the most touches with customers? It certainly isn’t the CEO or leadership team. The most touches are at the bottom of the org chart and decrease as you go up each level. Those are the people who load trucks, the people who pack your product into cartons, the CSRs, etc.
I have always thought that the most important job of the CEO and senior leaders is to create an environment where everyone else in the company can be successful. They need to be servant leaders. Without true servant leadership, a business will never be able to operate for the benefit of all stakeholders. To be a servant leader, you must feel and act like you are merely a servant.
With this in mind, I propose that we finally retire the idea of the organizational chart and replace it with a Stakeholder Responsibility Chart. Pursuing or taking a promotion should feel more like it feels to add more weights to the bar when you are weight lifting than climbing another rung on the ladder. So you can bench your weight ten reps, great. Moving up should be made to feel like adding more weight to the bar. Do you want to move from line lead to shift leader? Fine, here’s another twenty-five lbs. but don’t worry, I’ll spot you. Do you want that senior leadership or CEO role? Here’s another fifty on the bar…sorry, no spot.
Creating a Stakeholder Responsibility Chart helps foster a culture of servant leadership, puts the customers and other stakeholders at the top and closer to the people whose work touches them most frequently, it illustrates who in the organization is responsible for whom and who their internal customers are. It is impossible to create a culture based on servant leadership unless we strive to only put people into roles where they are willing and able to bear the weight of that role.
What would your company’s Stakeholder Responsibility Chart look like and how much weight are you willing to bear? Create one and become servants to those who serve someone else and great things will happen.
